Boston : The Back Bay Let's Go - Boston - Birth of the Back Bay Page 1 of 2 Home Destinations Bookstore Resources Forums Features BOSTON LET'S GO Boston Life & Times / History / 19th Century: Boston Brahmins / Birth of the Back Bay LET'S GO Birth of the Back Bay Search Let's Go These immigrant groups were greeted with a less than kindly reception from the Brahmins, who saw BACK/UP/NEXT them as an unwanted threat to their Puritan A LET'S GO CITY DISCOVER BOSTON hamlet on a hill. Although they spent much of the ONCE IN BOSTON 20th century trying to curb the power of immigrant BOS LIFE & TIMES groups, as the years wore on it was in non- History Brahmins---especially Irish Catholics---that the 17th Century: Pilgrims city's social and political power was centered. Buy from Glob & Puritans Amazon, 18th Century: the Sensing defeat, when less-than-acceptable or for you American Revolution neighbors finally began creeping up onto Beacon Not logged in 19th Century: Boston Hill, the Brahmins evacuated and headed for land Brahmins that was being created just for them. Although the Rise of Boston filling in of Back Bay (with land from the other 2 of STA TRAVEL Brahmins the Shawmut Peninsula's 3 hills) had begun in the Civil War & Abolition great student early 19th century, it did not start in earnest until from Post-War Boom 1858, when hundreds of thousands of loads of Birth of the Back Bay to gravel from Needham were transported to the city Athens of America depart and dumped into the festering swamp west of date Aug Early 20th Century: Downtown Boston. Nearly 4 decades later, Boston return Corrupt Politics date had gained over 400 acres and the entirely new Late 20th Century: a I am a student City Reborn neighborhoods of the Back Bay and the South date of birth (m 21st Century: Building a End. Moreover, the "First Families" gained a new Modern Beantown place for their mansions, filling the Back Bay with Find far Further Resources luxurious palaces befitting their self-envisioned ALTERNATIVES TO regal status. TOURISM Book a t Choose a country Only in Let's Go: Boston: Sights Choose a cou Food & Drink Nightlife Note: See Commonwealth Sports & Entertainment Shopping Avenue file. Arrival Date: Accommodations Number of Daytrips From Boston Nights: Planning Your Trip Service Directory Powere http://www.letsgo.com/BOS/03-LifeTimes-463 8/24/2004 Let's Go - Boston - Athens of America Page 1 of 2 Home Destinations Bookstore Resources Forums Features BOSTON LET'S GO Boston / Life & Times / History / 19th Century:Boston Brahmins / Athens of America LET'S Athens of America Search Let's Go Yet despite their snobbery and their eventual fall from prominence, the Brahmins did leave a BACK/UP /NEXT significant legacy for the city of Boston, and did A LET'S GO CITY DISCOVER BOSTON much to improve the quality of intellectual life ONCE IN BOSTON during their era of prominence. The time of the BOST LIFE & TIMES "First Families" rule was one of great cultural and History artistic growth, centered mostly on the creation of 17th Century: Pilgrims many important civic and cultural institutions in the Buy from Glob & Puritans long-neglected Fenway area (where they remain Amazon, 18th Century: the to this day). Private donations from deep blue- or for you American Revolution blood coffers provided most of the funding for Not logged in 19th Century: Boston such ventures as the Boston Public Library Brahmins (which doubles as an art museum), the world- Rise of Boston renowned Museum of Fine Arts (eventually STA TRAVEL Brahmins Civil War & Abolition moved to the Fenway from its original Copley Sq. great student location), the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and from Post-War Boom the now-defunct Museum of Natural History, all to Birth of the Back Bay built between 1840 and 1880. This influx of high Athens of America depart Aug culture and the city's propensity for fostering high- date Early 20th Century: minded thinking earned Boston the nickname return Corrupt Politics date "Athens of America." Indeed, around this time, Late 20th Century: a I am a student City Reborn Mark Twain noted: "In New York, they ask 'How date of birth (m 21st Century: Building a much is he worth?" In Philadelphia, 'Who were his Modern Beantown parents?' In Boston, they ask 'How much does he find for Further Resources know?" ALTERNATIVES TO TOURISM Book a I Choose a country Only in Let's Go: Boston: Sights Choose a cou Food & Drink Nightlife Arrival Date: Sports & Entertainment Shopping Accommodations Number of Daytrips From Boston Nights: Planning Your Trip Service Directory Powere http://www.letsgo.com/BOS/03-LifeTimes-465 8/24/2004 BostonFamilyHistory.com -- The Place to Meet Your Past Page 1 of 6 Boston Family History.com The Place to Meet Your Past Home > Boston's Neighborhoods > Back Bay Learn more about your ancestor's neighborhood through the timeline, Home find more information in the Further Reading section, or use the links Immigrant to experience life in that community today. Boston Neighborhood History Timeline Walk Historic Further Reading Boston Links Plan a Trip Genealogical Resources Timeline Family History for Kids 1600-1750: Back Bay is named as the Bay in the back of the Guest Book town. It is a tidal bay, and at low tide primarily tidal flats. Native Search American fish weirs in this area, off of what is now the Common, Boston History Collaborative go back at least 1000 years. They were found during building excavations for The New England on Boylston Street (between Berkeley and Clarendon Streets.) 1775: British troops cross Back Bay on their way to Lexington and Concord. 1821: Mill Dam runs from Beacon Street to Charles Street and across to Sewellís Point, Brookline. The dam is the brainchild of Uriah Cotting and the Roxbury Mill Corporation. The structure is 50 feet wide and one half mile long with a toll road running over it between a row of trees. It is called Western Avenue and later Beacon Street. 1825: Back Bay is annexed to Boston. 1827-1847: The city discharges raw sewage into the basin of http://www.bostonfamilyhistory.com/neigh bbay.html 1/4/2005 BostonFamilyHistory.com -- The Place to Meet Your Past Page 2 of 6 Mill Dam. 1837: The Public Garden opens. It is the idea of horticulturist Horace Gray. The Garden is later redesigned by George Meacham in 1859. GBD'S 1850s: A second perpendicular dam is extended from Mill Dam to Gravelley Point, Roxbury that divides the bay into two parts. The Boston and Worcester and Boston and Providence Railroads run across the marsh. Steam power and railroads combine to accelerate the filling of Back Bay. However, the dam and railroads disrupt the tides and combined with pollution make the area a stagnant cesspool. 1857: Several contracts were awarded to fill in the Back Bay. While some of the fill was given to the contractors, the rest was taken by train from Needham. 1858: Arlington Street and Commonwealth Avenue Mall are laid out. Arthur Gilman and Gridley J. Fox Bryant design a street plan for Back Bay that is a grid. Streets are named for Massachusetts towns from Arlington to Ipswich and arranged in alphabetical order. 1859: Edward Clarke Cabot designs the Russell and Gibson Houses on Beacon Street 1860: The Arlington Street Church is constructed and designed by Arthur Gilman and Gridley J. F. Bryant. It is the oldest church in Back Bay. By this time, Back Bay has been filled to Clarendon Street. 1862: Emmanuel Church is designed by A.R. Estey on Newbury Street. 1863: The initial buildings of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Museum of Natural History are built side by side on Boylston Street. MIT is founded by William Barton Rogers whose father Partick was an Irish immigrant who http://www.bostonfamilyhistory.com/neigh1 bbay.html 1/4/2005 BostonFamilyHistory.com -- The Place to Meet Your Past Page 3 of 6 fled to the United States after the failed Irish uprising of 1798. Both MIT and the museum later moved. 1866: The Central Congregational Church is built on Berkeley and Newbury. 1867: William Gibbons Preston (1842-1910) and Clemens Herschelís (1842-1930) suspension bridge in the Garden is the smallest of its kind in the world. 1868: The First Church (originally founded in 1632) is moved to Berkeley and Marlborough Streets. That same year, William Robert Ware establishes the first architecture school in the United States at MIT. 1869: Thomas Ballís (1819-1911) statue of George Washington is unveiled in the Public Garden. Patrick S. Gilmore hosts the National Peace Jubilee in St. James Park to celebrate the end of the Civil War. A 10,000 person chorus, 1,000 piece orchestra, and 100 anvil percussion section played the Anvil Chorus of Il Travatore as the finale. 1870: Oliver Wendell Holmesi (1809-1894) townhouse is built on Beacon Street. It is now an apartment building. At this point, Back Bay has been filled to Exeter Street. 1872: Thomas Paget takes visitors on the first swan boat ride in the Garden. Park Square station is built by Peabody and Stearns as a stop on the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. It is later demolished. 1872-1877: The Trinity Church is built in Copley Square. 1873: Brattle Square Church, designed by Henry H. Richardson, is built on Commonwealth Avenue. The structure is constructed on 4,500 wooden pilings that were sunk into the ground. 1876: The original Museum of Fine Arts opens in Copley Square on the site where the Copley Plaza Hotel now stands (built http://www.bostonfamilyhistory.com/neigh bbay.html 1/4/2005 BostonFamilyHistory.com -- The Place to Meet Your Past Page 4 of 6 1911). 1879: The Trinity Church rectory is designed by Henry.H. Richardson (1837-1886). Peabody and Stearns finish a townhouse for John Phillips which is now the First Lutheran Church of Boston on Marlborough Street. 1880: Emerson College of Oratory is founded. At this point, Back Bay has been filled nearly to the mainland. 1881: The Harvard Medical School is built at Boylston and Exeter Streets. The Prince School is built and named after Mayor Frederick O. Prince (1818-1881). 1883: Copley Square is named after Beacon Hill artist John Singleton Copley. 1884: Hollis Street Church is built. Edward Everett Hale (1822- 1909) is its pastor for many years as well as being the chaplain of the United States Senate. 1893: A 100 foot promenade is extended into the Charles River. 1895: Mary Baker Eddyís first Christian Scientist Church in Boston is built on Falmouth and Norway Streets. The Boston Public Library opens at Copley Square. 1901: The Lenox Hotel, designed by Arthur Bowditch, is constructed. 1905: William Lindsay (1858-1921), inventor of the ammunition belt, commissions Chapman and Frazer to build him a mansion on Bay State Road. Today, "The Castle" is owned by Boston University. 1906: Charles Brigham designs the First Church of Christ, Christian Scientist Church on Huntington Ave. http://www.bostonfamilyhistory.com/neigh bbay.html 1/4/2005 NABB - History of Back Bay Page 1 of 6 NABB History of Back Bay Select Home 1814 Development begins: Mass legislature chartered the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation, and approved construction of a long mill What is NABB dam to cut off 430 acres of tidal flats from the river, which also Join NABB served as a toll road to Watertown. The dam is under present-day Beacon Street. Current News Letters 1821 Basin subdivided into Upper or Fill Basin, Lower or Receiving Committees Basin, to power water mills 1828 70-75 Beacon Street built along the mill dam, oldest structures in Friends and Neighbors the Back Bay Activities 1841 US Harbor Commission established line beyond which the Back Resources for Residents Bay could not be filled, and thus encroach on the harbor History of Back Bay 1849 Health Department demanded the area be filled Links 1850 152 Beacon Street built for Isabella Stewart by her father 1850 Contact Us Mass appointed commission to investigate the Back Bay and recommend development options Site Map 1852 July -- Commission on Harbor and Back Bay Lands appointed 1853 Commissioners on Boston Harbor and Back Bay Lands begin writing annual reports 1855 Name of Commission on Harbor and Back Bay Lands changed to Commissioners on Public Lands 1856 Tripartite Agreement of 1856 between the State of Mass, Boston, and the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation-dividing up the lands. Part of the city land went to develop the Public Garden. 1857 September--Filling of the Back Bay began-average depth of fill http://www.nabbonline.com/history.htm 1/4/2005 3/16/2016 Back Bay History I NABB Online search Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay 11 Home About Us Membership Committees Activities City Resources Links Contact Us 160 Commonwealth Ave Back Bay History Boston, MA 02116 Phone: (617) 247-3961. Fax: (617) 247-3387. For a genealogical history of Back Bay's houses - information about who lived in them and how info@nabbonline.com they were used over the decades - go to the website Back Bay Houses. Launched in 2014, the website is the culmination of ten years of research to identify who lived in (and, if possible, who About NABB owned) each Back Bay property. All you have to do is click on a property's address to find out the NABB's Officers and names of the house's prior residents (including wives' unmarried names) and read a very high- Directors level summary of what they did in the world. Voilà - Your instant Back Bay ancestors! Back Bay History Timeline of the History of the Back Bay NABB's Community Service Awards 1814 Development begins: Massachusetts Legislature chartered the Boston and Roxbury News Mill Corporation, and approved construction of a long mill dam to cut off 430 acres of Event Calendar tidal flats from the river, which also served as a toll road to Watertown. The dam is under present-day Beacon Street. Donate 1821 Basin subdivided into Upper or Fill Basin, Lower or Receiving Basin, to power water mills 1841 US Harbor Commission established line beyond which the Back Bay could not be filled, and thus encroach on the harbor 1849 Health Department demanded the area be filled 1850 Commission appointed to investigate the Back Bay and recommend development options 1852 July -- Commission on Harbor and Back Bay Lands appointed 1853 Commissioners on Boston Harbor and Back Bay Lands begin writing annual reports 1855 Name of Commission on Harbor and Back Bay Lands changed to Commissioners on Public Lands 1856 Tripartite Agreement of 1856 between the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the City of Boston, and the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation - dividing up the lands. Part of the city land went to develop the Public Garden. 1857 September--Filling of the Back Bay began-average depth of fill 20 feet; more than 450 acres filled; fill brought from Needham; streets were filled to grade 17 (17 ft above mean low tide), lots filled to grade 12, so basements would be below street level. http://www.nabbonline.com/about_us/back_bay_history 1/4 3/16/2016 Back Bay History I NABB Online Back Bay from the State House 1857 1859 The Unitarian congregation, then in a church on Federal Street designed by Charles Bulfinch, votes to build a new building in the Back Bay at the corner of Arlington and Boylston Streets. 1860 The house at 137 Beacon Street, later known as the Gibson House, was built 1860 152 Beacon Street built for Isabella Stewart by her father 1860 Filling of Back Bay reached Clarendon Street 1861 State granted a block of Back Bay (Boylston and Berkeley) to the Boston Society of Natural History and MIT 1861 Halcyon Place (corner of Berkeley and Commonwealth) built as a guest home for families of patients at Mass General 1861 The Unitarians' new church, now known as Arlington Street Church, is completed. It is the first public building in the Back Bay. 1862 Emmanuel Church (15 Newbury Street), the first building constructed on Newbury Street, is consecrated. 1863 MIT located on Boylston-current site of New England Life building 1864 Society of Natural History building completed (Berkeley between Boylston and Newbury) 1865 December-Toll no longer collected on mill dam toll road 1865 First statue erected on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall 1867 Central Congregational Church completed (Newbury Street and Berkeley) 1868 First Church of 1630 (Unitarian) moved from Chauncy Place to newly completed church designed by Ware and Van Brunt (Berkeley and Marlborough) 1869 Temporary coliseum built in Copley Square. It held the National Peace Jubilee that year, which was attended by President Ulysses Grant 1870 Filling of Back Bay reached Exeter Street 1871 160 Commonwealth, Hotel Vendome, built--first hotel in city with electric lighting, it had an independent lighting plant designed by Edison in 1882 1871 Brattle Square Church (Unitarian) moved to newly built church designed by H.H. Richardson (Commonwealth and Clarendon) aka-"church of the holy bean blowers." Statues on the tower designed by Frederic August Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty. 1872 Fire destroys 65 acres of downtown Boston http://www.nabbonline.com/about_us/back_bay_history 2/4 3/16/2016 Back Bay History I NABB Online Commonwealth Ave in Process, 1872 1874 Second Church of 1660 (Unitarian) moved from Bedford Street to newly completed church (Boylston between Dartmouth and Clarendon) 1875 Third Church (Congregational) moved from Old South Meeting Hall to newly completed church (Dartmouth and Boylston) 1876 Museum of Fine Arts opened in Copley Square 1877 Trinity Church completed, designed by H.H. Richardson 1879 Commissioners on Public Lands changed to Harbor and Land Commission 1880 150 Beacon Street - Isabella Stewart Gardner bought to expand her home at 152 1880 Land for the current site of Boston Public Library purchased 1882 Filling of Back Bay complete to Charlesgate East Ru = House on the Corner of Exeter and Marlborough 1883 Harvard Medical School located in building at Boylston and Exeter 1883 Triangle lot bounded by Huntington, Dartmouth, Boylston purchased and named Copley Square 1884 Hollis Street Church completed (southeast corner of Newbury and Exeter, current site of Exeter towers) It was destroyed in 1966 1884 Triangle lot bounded by Huntington, Trinity Place, St. James added to Copley Square to make it a square 1885 Temple of the Working Union of Progressive Spiritualists completed (northeast corner of Newbury and Exeter) 1887 Bridge from West Chester park in Boston to Mass Ave in Cambridge authorized 1889 Bay State Road created by dredging the river and filling the Charles Rivers http://www.nabbonline.com/about_us/back_bay_history 3/4 3/16/2016 Back Bay History I NABB Online 1890 Filling of Back Bay reached Kenmore Square 1891 Bridge from West Chester Park in Boston to Mass Ave in Cambridge opened to travel, and renamed the John Harvard bridge 1894 West Chester Park renamed Massachusetts Avenue 1895 Boston Public Library opened in Copley Square 1895 Christian Science Church dedicated 1899 Mass Historical society moved from 30 Tremont Street to the newly built 1154 Boylston Street 1900 Filling of Back Bay completed with last few acres of the Fens 1908 Last single-family residence built on an originally vacant lot in the residential district at 530 Beacon Street 1910 MIT moved to Cambridge Aerial View of Back Bay, 1925 1955 Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay formed 1963- Magnolias planted on Commonwealth Avenue 1965 1966 Massachusetts Legislature establishes the Back Bay Architectural District 1967 Back Bay Architectural Commission holds its first meeting 1969 20 Gloucester Street - First conversion of an existing residental building to condominium units in the City of Boston 1973 Back Bay added to the National Registry of Historic Places Images provided courtesy of the Boston Public Library. To see more historic images, please visit the BPL's digital image gallery. NABB 160 Commonwealth Ave, suite L-8 Boston, MA 02116 Tel: (617) 247-3961 info@nabbonline.com Copyright © 2016 Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay. All rights reserved. Banner photos copyright © 2008 Penny Cherubino. All rights reserved. Web site design and development by Digital Loom - Boston, MA http://www.nabbonline.com/about_us/back_bay_history 4/4 NABB - History of Back Bay Page 2 of 6 20 feet; more than 450 acres filled; fill brought from Needham; streets were filled to grade 17 (17 ft above mean low tide), lots filled to grade 12, so basements would be below street level. Back Bay from the State House 1857 1859 Arlington Street Church built 1860 The house at 137 Beacon Street, later known as the Gibson House, was built 1860 Filling of Back Bay reached Clarendon Street 1861 State granted a block of Back Bay (Boylston and Berkeley) to the Boston Society of Natural History and MIT 1861 Halcyon Place (corner of Berkeley and Commonwealth) built as a guest home for families of patients at Mass General 1862 152 Beacon Street-Isabella Stewart Gardner moved in 1862 Emmanuel Church completed (Newbury Street) 1863 MIT located on Boylston-current site of New England Life building 1864 Society of Natural History building completed (Berkeley between Boylston and Newbury) 1865 December-Toll no longer collected on mill dam toll road 1865 First statue erected on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall (also see http://www.nabbonline.com/history.htm 1/4/2005 NABB - History of Back Bay Page 3 of 6 Mall statues) 1867 Central Congregational Church completed (Newbury Street and Berkeley) 1868 First Church of 1630 (Unitarian) moved from Chauncey Place to newly completed church designed by Ware and Van Brunt (Berkeley and Marlborough) 1869 Temporary coliseum built in Copley Square. It held the National Peace Jubilee that year, which was attended by President Ulysses Grant 1870 Filling of Back Bay reached Exeter Street 1871 160 Commonwealth, Hotel Vendome, built-first hotel in city with electric lighting, it had an independent lighting plant designed by Edison in 1882 1871 Brattle Square Church (Unitarian) moved to newly built church designed by H.H. Richardson (Commonwealth and Clarendon) aka- "church of the holy bean blowers." Statues on the tower designed by Frederic August Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty. 1872 Fire destroys 65 acres of downtown Boston Commonwealth Ave in Process, 1872 1874 Second Church of 1660 (Unitarian) moved from Bedford Street to http://www.nabbonline.com/history.htm 1/4/2005 NABB - History of Back Bay Page 4 of 6 newly completed church (Boylston between Dartmouth and Clarendon) 1875 Third Church (Congregational) moved from Old South Meeting Hall to newly completed church (Dartmouth and Boylston) 1876 Museum of Fine Arts opened in Copley Square 1877 Trinity Church completed, designed by H.H. Richardson 1879 Commissioners on Public Lands changed to Harbor and Land Commission 1880 150 Beacon Street-Isabella Stewart Gardner bought to expand her home at 152 1880 Land for the current site of Boston Public Library purchased 1882 Filling of Back Bay complete to Charlesgate East House on Marlborough & Fairfield 1883 Harvard Medical School located in building at Boylston and Exeter 1883 Triangle lot bounded by Huntington, Dartmouth, Boylston purchased and named Copley Square 1884 Hollis Street Church completed (southeast corner of Newbury and Exeter, current site of Exeter towers) It was destroyed in 1966 http://www.nabbonline.com/history.htm 1/4/2005 NABB - History of Back Bay Page 5 of 6 1884 Triangle lot bounded by Huntington, Trinity Place, St. James added to Copley Square to make it a square 1885 Temple of the Working Union of Progressive Spiritualists completed (northeast corner of Newbury and Exeter) 1887 Bridge from West Chester park in Boston to Mass Ave in Cambridge authorized 1889 Bay State Road created by dredging the river and filling the Charles Rivers 1890 Filling of back bay reached Kenmore Square 1891 Bridge from West Chester Park in Boston to Mass Ave in Cambridge opened to travel, and renamed the John Harvard bridge 1894 West Chester Park renamed Massachusetts Avenue 1895 Boston Public Library opened in Copley Square 1895 Christian Science Church dedicated 1899 Mass Historical society moved from 30 Tremont Street to the newly built 1154 Boylston Street 1900 Filling of Back Bay completed with last few acres of the Fens 1904 5 Commonwealth Ave built by Walter C. Baylies; 1912 built ballroom for daughter's debut. Building now houses the Boston Center for Adult Education. 1910 MIT moved to Cambridge http://www.nabbonline.com/history.htm 1/4/2005 8/10/2021 Overview: Development of the Back Bay I Back Bay Houses Back Bay Houses Genealogies of Back Bay Houses Overview: Development of the Back Bay Overview - 1855-1859 - 1860-1864 - 1865-1869 - 1870-1874 - 1875-1879 - 1880-1884 - 1885-1889 - 1890-1899 - 1900-1909 - 1910-2015 The Back Bay neighborhood of Boston is built almost entirely on filled (or "made") land, replacing what originally was a relatively shallow bay and tide lands. Transforming this area to land which could be used for building purposes took several decades and rep- resented one of the largest landfill operations in the 19th Century. A number of excellent books and articles have been written on the filling of the Back Bay. Walter Muir Whitehill's Boston, A Topographical History and Bainbridge Bunting's Houses of Boston's Back Bay provide overviews. More comprehensive information is included in Nancy S. Seasholes's Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston, which discusses the Back Bay project in the context of Boston's overall land fill develop- ment, in Boston's Back Bay by William A. Newman and Wilfred E. Holton, which is de- voted exclusively to the filling of the Back Bay, and in Karl Haglund's Inventing the Charles River, which examines the evolution of the Charles River, including the Esplanade. These books contain excellent maps showing the progress of the filling op- erations, many based on the early blueprint maps prepared in 1881 by Fuller and Whit- ney, civil engineers associated with the project, in their A Set of Plans Showing the Back Bay 1814-1881. https://backbayhouses.org/overview-development-of-the-back-bay/ 1/22 8/10/2021 Overview: Development of the Back Bay I Back Bay Houses The development of the Back Bay began as a water power project. In 1814, the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation was authorized by the Massachusetts legislature to build a dam from the corner of Charles and Beacon Streets in the east to Sewall's Point in the west (at that time in Brookline; what is today Kenmore Square in Boston), separating about 430 acres of tidal lands from the Charles River. A Cross Dam was built connect- ing with the Mill Dam at a point about 210 feet west of what is today Hereford and run- ning southwest at approximately a 45 degree angle to Gravelly Point (at about what is today the intersection of Commonwealth and Massachusetts Avenues). The Cross Dam divided the tidal lands into two basins. A western basin (about where the Fenway neighborhood is today), called the Full Basin, and an eastern basin (about where the Back Bay neighborhood is today), called the Receiving Basin. Water was allowed to flow into the Full Basin from the river at high tide, then into the Receiving Basin and then back into the river at low tide. The tidal flows were used to power mills located along the Cross Dam. A toll road was built on top of the dam and is today's Beacon Street. The project was completed in 1821 and was not highly successful. In 1834, the legislature permit- ted construction of two railroad causeways that formed an "x" across the Receiving Basin. These impeded the tidal flows and made the mill operations even less productive. In addi- tion, sewage was allowed to flow freely into the basins and, over time, the area became odi- ferous and unhealthy. At the same time, Boston's population was growing and more land was needed to accommodate that Detail from an 1853 map of the City of Boston by George W, Boynton, courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map growth. As Nancy S. Seasholes's Center at the Boston Public Library. Gaining Ground discusses in de- tail, the city had historically grown by filling land, and the Back Bay presented an oppor- tunity to eliminate a health hazard while meeting an economic need. https://backbayhouses.org/overview-development-of-the-back-bay/ 2/22 8/10/2021 Overview: Development of the Back Bay I Back Bay Houses The map at the right, detail from an 1853 map by George W. Boynton, shows the Back Bay as it existed in 1853, with the extension of Beacon Street along the mill dam re- ferred to as Western Avenue. The photograph below shows this area in a panoramic view taken from the Massachu- setts State House ca. 1858. The Mill Dam appears on the right, running west towards Brookline, with the Cross Dam running south to Gravelly Point. The Boston and Worcester Railroad and Boston and Providence Railroad lines cross at the center of the Receiving Basin. Photograph looking west and southwest from the Boston State House, attributed to Southworth & Hawes (ca. 1858); courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum In 1850, the Massachusetts Legislature appointed three Commissioners to investigate the ownership of the tidal flats in the Back Bay and "consider what measures can be taken for the improvement of the said flats of land, so as to make them most valuable to all parties interested therein" (Chapter 111, Resolves of 1850 and Chapter 80, Re- solves of 1851). The Commissioners presented their report in March of 1852, recom- mending that the Commonwealth should "authorize the parties of interest to change the use of the receiving basin from mill purposes to land purposes, and fill up the same," and suggested specific steps that the Commonwealth should take towards that end. That same month, the legislature (Chapter 79, Resolves of 1852) established a perman- ent three member board of commissioners to implement the previous commissioners' recommendations. The Commissioners on Boston Harbor and the Back Bay (renamed the Commissioners on the Back Bay in 1855; Chapter 388, Acts of 1855) were charged with the authority "to determine and settle, by agreement, arbitration or process of https://backbayhouses.org/overview-development-of-the-back-bay/ 3/22 Back Bay Patrons by Walter Muir Whitehill When the Museum of Fine Arts was incorporated in 1870, the Back Bay was only ten years old. Four out of the twelve Founders, however, had already moved to the new region, although six still lived around Beacon Hill, and two outside the city limits of Boston. The transformation of the Back Bay from water to land was part of a process of topographical change by which Bostonians, almost from the moment of settlement in 1630, had been tinkering with their landscape in an effort to accommodate an expanding pop- ulation on the small water-ringed peninsula that had been chosen for a wilderness village. In the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies, when Boston was a compact British seaport, nearly every- one lived close to the harbor, in the North End or the old South End (the present department store district). Only after the build- ing of the present State House in 1795, on the southern slope of Beacon Hill, did the adjacent upland fields and the streets facing Boston Common rapidly become a new residential district that bore the architectural mark of the style of Charles Bulfinch. In 1800 Boston was still a relatively simple, compact, and homogeneous seaport with only 24,397 inhabitants. Its great expansion, which was to come throughout the nineteenth century, was SO enormous that by 1900, through waves of immigration rolling in from Europe, Boston was a city of 560,892 inhabitants. As the town grew, SO did its wealth. The China Trade gave nineteenth century Boston a running start on prosperity. More money was made in manufacturing and mercantile pursuits. Textile mills proliferated around New England, but the capital and initiative came from Boston, where the owners generally lived. As the cen- tury progressed, capital gained in maritime commerce would often be plowed not only into textile manufacturing but into the development of railroads, mines, and land far beyond the confines of New England. This growth in people and prosperity produced an acute shortage of space. Thus in 1856 steps were begun to obtain more land through the filling of the Back Bay. Bostonians had always had a special affection for Paris, pos- sibly because of lingering anglophobia from two wars with England. The design of Commonwealth Avenue and other Back Bay streets reflected the spaciousness of Baron Haussmann's new Paris boulevards just as the new City Hall, built on School Street during the Civil War, mirrored the architectural style of the French Second Empire. So for that matter did the mansard roofs 86 of many Back Bay houses. By the filling of the Back Bay a hand- some new residential district was created to replace the older ones that were being encroached upon by business and by the burgeoning slums. As Franklin and Summer Streets, Temple Place, Tremont Street, Park Street, and Pemberton Square were taken over by business, many families built houses in the new Back Bay. John Lowell Gardner, for example, whose family lived at the corner of Beacon and Somerset Streets, moved to a newly built brownstone house at 152 Beacon Street when he married Isabella Stewart of New York in 1860. The fashion he set was eagerly followed. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes reflected the general feeling when, mov- ing to 296 Beacon Street a decade later, he announced that he was "committing justifiable domicide." The Bostonians who migrated to the Back Bay left none of their traditions or characteristics behind them. Indeed they throve even more vigorously on "the flat" of the Back Bay streets. The proceeds of their diligence, whether in maritime commerce, man- ufacturing, banking, or investment, continued to support Harvard College and to found and nurture an extraordinary galaxy of institutions, learned and benevolent, humanistic and scientific, that make Boston and its Back Bay a center of civilization. A transplanted English editor, E. L. Godkin, observed in 1871 that "Boston is the one place in America where wealth and knowledge of how to use it are apt to coincide." Back Bay was a particular coincidence. Almost as soon as the people came, the churches faithfully followed. The Unitarians of the Federal Street Church, over which William Ellery Channing had presided from 1803 to 1842, began to build in 1859, at the corner of Arlington and Boylston Streets, the present Arlington Street Church. The First Church bought land on the corner of Berkeley and Marlborough Streets in 1865, and occupied a new Ware and Van Brunt Gothic church there in 1868. On the periph- eries of what became in 1883 Copley Square, the Third (or Old South) Church bought land in 1869, Trinity Church in 1871, and the Second Church in 1872. The Back Bay Bostonians not only brought along their old institutions; they founded new ones. From the Legislature in the winter of 1860-1861 the Boston Society of Natural History, or- ganized in 1830, received a grant of land on Berkeley Street (ex- 87 tending from Boylston to Newbury); on this site it soon built the forerunner of today's Science Museum, which now houses Bonwit Teller's shop. The remainder of this block was devoted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, incorporated in 1861 and now located across the Charles River in Cambridge. Here was formed the first school of architecture in the United States, and here the Lowell Institute's public lectures were given, watched over by Augustus Lowell, who lived conveniently nearby at 171 Commonwealth Avenue. Almost next door to him, at 191 Com- monwealth, Henry Lee Higginson watched over the Boston Sym- phony Orchestra, which he founded in 1881. The early presence of these institutions begat others. The newly incorporated Museum of Fine Arts was awarded by the City on May 26, 1870 a plot of land at the corner of Dartmouth Street and St. James Avenue that had been given in trust by the Boston Water Power Company (the previous owner of part of the Back Bay), to be used either for an Institute of Fine Arts or for an open square. Nearby, the Harvard Medical School moved in 1883 to a new building at Boylston and Exeter Streets, while in 1888 the cornerstone was laid for the adjacent building of the Boston Public Library, which was first opened to readers in 1895. Institutions begin as ideas in the mind of man. They are sus- tained successfully only if that mind is tenacious as well as intelligent. This is in the Boston tradition. The Boston Athenaeum, a proprietory library incorporated in 1807, grew out of a dining club organized in 1804 by a typical Boston mixture of clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and merchants who were also literary en- thusiasts. This happy ambivalence is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Provident Institution for Savings, which from 1833 to 1856 shared a building at 30 Tremont Street; there James Savage, an officer of both, would happily run up and down stairs as he turned from receiving deposits to editing historical documents. His parallel is to be found again and again in the Back Bay: Edward Jackson Holmes, who on the left hand was a lawyer, and on the right hand, Acting Director and then President of the Museum; Charles Goddard Weld, who trained as a doctor and who was one of the greatest benefactors of the Museum's Asiatic Department; or Henry Lee Higginson, stockbroker and music maker. These and other Back Bay residents gave an extraordinary 88 amount of their skill, thought, and leisure to the disinterested service of cultural and charitable institutions, and such institu- tions have benefited extraordinarily from their generosity. This blending of scholars with an endlessly renewable supply of literate and responsible Trustees and treasurers has done more than anything else to make Boston a center of civilization, or, in Alfred North Whitehead's more affectionate view, to place Boston in a position comparable to that occupied by Paris in the Middle Ages. By 1900 almost every lot in the Back Bay had been completely built upon from Arlington Street west to Massachusetts Avenue, and from the Charles River south to Boylston Street. In the early years of the twentieth century, the pattern of the Back Bay was extended further to the westward along the Charles River in Bay State Road (laid out in 1889), and to the southwest in the Fenway, the road bordering the Muddy River and the Back Bay Fens, de- signed in the eighties by Frederick Law Olmsted to link in a con- tinuous green area the Public Garden and Commonwealth Avenue with Franklin Park in West Roxbury. These extensions were over- ambitious, for neither of them were ever completely built up with private houses as originally envisioned. But the Back Bay from Arlington Street to Charlesgate was a singularly unified and handsome area. Although its houses were mostly built by indi- vidual owners using a variety of architects, the observance of setbacks and height limits gave an architectural unity to the blocks. Commonwealth Avenue in the days of horse-drawn car- riages and sleighs was a distinguished boulevard that can hardly be imagined with today's ubiquity of automobiles, parked and in motion. Form followed function in the houses of the Back Bay. The almost universal plan called for a downstairs reception room where those not on intimate terms with the family were received. The upstairs library or reception room was used to greet friends and relatives. This could also serve as an office for the head of the household, for he might come home at noon for lunch, and afterward work on his figures under his own roof. The alleys between the houses served as routes for tradesmen and gave access to the back doors. Goods and victuals were delivered, a reason why there were no shops or stores in the original Back Bay; even today they appear only on the periphery of the major resi- dential streets. The Back Bay was socially homogeneous, for many 89 residents would be only a block or two away from the majority of their sisters and their cousins and their aunts. In the summer the region was deserted, for a substantial resident would have one if not two country houses outside the city. The Spaulding brothers of 99 Beacon Street had a house at Prides Crossing on the North Shore, which was in tolerable reach by train, but some of their neighbors who summered in Maine might also have a house in Brookline, Chestnut Hill, or Readville for spring and fall. Between domestic moves, the Back Bay Bostonians traveled. They visited London, Paris, and Rome; they journeyed to the Near and the Far East. Frequently, the fruits of their travels appeared first as loans and then as gifts to the Museum. Diligence was also apparent here, for they collected, often ahead of anyone else, works of rare beauty and importance. At home they encouraged, used, and bought works of their contemporaries. John Singer Sargent came to their houses as a welcome guest, as their court painter, and as the decorator of their public buildings. John La Farge made his stained glass windows for them; Augustus Saint Gaudens sculpted their monuments and their heroes. They painted like Edward Boit of 176 Beacon Street, who was accom- plished enough to hold joint watercolor exhibitions with Sargent, and to sell out almost as fast. They pursued hobbies like Mrs. J. Montgomery Sears, who turned the attic of her Arlington Street house into a photographic studio and library. They held musi- cales, like Mrs. John L. Gardner and Mrs. Sears. They gave en- couragement to the arts not only by general support but by such specific generosities as Edward Boit's traveling scholarships for the Museum School, or Benjamin Smith Rotch's architectural fellowships, established in 1883, which have provided foreign travel for such contemporaries as Edward D. Stone, Walter F. Bogner, Wallace K. Harrison, Gordon Bunshaft, and Louis Skidmore. There were few places in this Back Bay world for large public gatherings, for Bostonians have always liked the intimacy of private houses. Eighteenth-century visitors to Boston noted that social clubs met in members' houses, rather than taverns or places of public entertainment. When Boston clubs in the nine- teenth century began to acquire permanent premises, they tried to keep them as much like private houses as possible. The only places in Boston where one of Peter Arno's well-stuffed "club 90 men" would feel that he had elbow room are the Algonquin Club, built in 1887 by McKim, Mead and White, and the Harvard Club of 1913, both on Commonwealth Avenue. The St. Botolph, Chilton, and College Clubs in the Back Bay occupy converted dwellings, as the Somerset, Union, Tavern, Odd Volumes, and Women's City Clubs do in other parts of Boston. All attempt to maintain the illusion of the private house. Just as the Museum of Fine Arts migrated from Copley Square to Huntington Avenue and the Fenway in 1909, most of the private residents of the Back Bay have decamped. As the automobile altered living habits, and as domestic service vanished, fewer and fewer of the largest private houses continued to be occupied in the manner for which they were built. Some have become apartments; others, offices, schools, or, at the worst, rooming houses. But the tide is turning, and as Beacon Hill houses have become increasingly difficult to find, or afford, the prospects of the Back Bay seem brighter. But whatever alterations may have been made within, a sufficient portion of the Back Bay has sur- vived to present a coherent picture of American architecture of the second half of the nineteenth century that cannot be matched elsewhere in the United States. Because the Back Bay is an architectural harmony that deserves respect and preservation, the Museum of Fine Arts on its centenary arranges this exhibi- tion as a tribute and as a timely warning. The pages that follow endeavor to show how certain residents played decisive roles in molding the Back Bay and in making the Museum what it is today. Walter Muir Whitehill 91 50 € Boston's Back Bay : The story of Americas gred test 19th Centery handfill Project neighborhood for many decades to come. Attracting some of the most prestigious Protestant churches and important cultural institutions to CHAPTER 3 BostoniNortheatum U.P., 2006. the Back Bay would keep many wealthy Protestant families in Boston. D Pollution, overcrowding, and a desire to keep wealthy Protestants in William A. Newman Boston were three compelling reasons for filling the Back Bay. While these motivations generated interest in creating the new neighborhood, Wilfaed E. Holton. carrying out such a massive project would be possible only if political and financial considerations could be worked through by several gov- Planning and Financing ernments and business interests. Leaders faced the challenge of making real the dream of a new, elegant neighborhood to replace a badly pol- the Back Bay Landfill luted former tidal marsh. Planning for filling the Back Bay would start in 1852 and the complex project would begin in 1858. Filling parts of the Back Bay began to be considered soon after the tidal 110 power project was completed in 1822. Several early plans and false starts were motivated by the increasing pollution and crowding as Boston's population grew. The various unrealized ideas for filling in the Back Bay reflected key considerations that would remain strong when the Back Bay Receiving Basin was finally filled, starting in 1858. Objections that were raised to some plans revealed concerns that would later shape plan- ning for a new, elegant neighborhood. Making the Back Bay project hap- pen required getting through bitter conflicts among several government groups and private parties: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the cities of Boston and Roxbury, the Boston Water Power Company, and in- dividual landowners and planners. In the end, the State Commission would be the most powerful player in pushing the project through to successful completion. Early, Unsuccessful Plans In 1824 a plan was proposed to fill and subdivide the area west of Charles Street, just west of the Boston Common beyond Charles Street (see fig. 3.1). As described by its promoters, the plan called for an elegant devel- FIGURE 5.13. View of Commonwealth Avenue. This photograph, apparently taken from opment with 321 house lots, spacious streets, and squares. 1 Five streets, the church tower at the corner of Clarendon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, shows each one block long, would run parallel to Beacon Street (the Mill Dam) the view to the west in 1872. Most houses have been completed in the block between Clarendon and Dartmouth Streets. The corner lots at Dartmouth Street lie six feet below and stop near the edge of the Eastern Channel in the Receiving Basin. the street level, illustrating the waffle pattern that was created when the middles of resi- The City of Boston committee appointed to investigate this plan feared dential blocks were left unfilled. Building construction had yet to occur on Common- that the new area would not attract wealthy buyers and instead would wealth Avenue west of Exeter Street. (Boston Athenaum.) FRAMINGHAM STATE COLLEGE 10 Boston's Back Bay Why Fill the Back Bay? 47 "social psychology" factor in the "Ecosystem Model" for understanding prejudices brought from England. The neighborhoods with the highest regional change. The values and desires of powerful groups in Boston percentages of Irish residents in 1850 were the Commercial District and shaped the project in fundamental ways. The other factors in Duncan's the old South End (62.6 percent), the North End (42.7 percent), South ecosystem model are population, organization, environment, and tech- Cove (42.5 percent), South Boston (42.1 percent), East Boston and the Is- nology all important elements in the filling of Boston's Back Bay. lands (40.9 percent), and Haymarket and the West End (40.4 percent). Chickering then considered the causes of the recent decline in the "American," or native-born, population. He estimated that two thousand Social Concerns Leading to Filling the Back Bay men had gone to California from Boston in the past year, lured by "that golden expedition," the gold rush. That emigration was of little concern Planning for the new Back Bay strongly emphasized keeping as many to Chickering, however, compared with the much larger number who wealthy families in Boston as possible. In the 1850s nearly all Boston's had moved to the suburbs of Boston. He noted the impact of commut- high income families were Protestant and their primary breadwinners ing by train, showing that many "merchants and others doing business were businessmen and professionals who worked in downtown Boston. in the City" had recently moved to neighboring towns and could com- Understanding social motivations in planning for the Back Bay proj- mute to their downtown jobs "as quickly and cheaply as if they had con- ect requires looking at the demographic and social changes revealed in tinued in their former residences." Chickering estimated that twenty the 1850 and 1855 census data and examining the reactions of commu- thousand people were commuting to Boston by train daily in 1850. 66 nity leaders to those changes. Dr. Jesse Chickering's special report in The railroad commuters were well-to-do Protestants who had moved 1850, discussed above, was commissioned by the city to investigate "some out of Boston-pushed out by crowded conditions in the city and the facts and considerations relating to the foreign population among us, and influx of poor Irish immigrants, and attracted to the suburbs by avail- especially in the City of Boston. "62 Although the possibility of filling the able land, large houses, and efficient transportation. This emerging sub- Back Bay is not mentioned in Chickering's report, he indicated clearly urban movement of high-income Protestant families threatened to in- the need to keep native-born residents in the city so the "foreign class" crease rapidly the relative population of Irish Catholic immigrants. It is would not completely dominate Boston. clear that Chickering feared this trend would continue and he felt that Between 1845 and 1850 Boston's population grew from 114,366 to Boston's character would change for the worse. 136,881, and the "foreign portion" (including children of foreign-born The considerations of ethnicity, religion, and class were very impor- parents) increased from 32.6 percent to 45.7 percent, nearing half of tant to the established "American" group, which was indeed losing the Boston's population. Most remarkably, the "foreign" population had light grip it had held on Boston's politics and culture for more than two grown by 70.2 percent in five years' time, while the "American" portion hundred years. Until the early decades of the nineteenth century, English- had decreased by 2.3 percent. Chickering stated that "most of this foreign descendant families who could trace their residence in Boston and New population are Irish mostly poor, downtrodden and uneducated." England from the seventeenth century had dominated Boston at all lev- He did note that, while these immigrants required charity, they tolerated els of the social structure. Chickering did hold out some hope for re- their "trials" well and made their "scanty means" go as far as possible. 63 taining the elite Protestants of English origin, whom he clearly valued Chickering was concerned that a large majority of the children in pub- and wanted to keep in Boston. 67 As he wrote, the South End develop- li primary schools were "foreign" children. These young people would ment was beginning to hold some wealthy Protestant families in the city. soon become adults, gain citizenship, and form a large voting bloc. 44 Social motivations for the Back Bay project centered on providing hous- In 1850 large portions of the populations in several Boston neighbor- ing for this group in Boston, and on giving them ample social and cul- hoods consisted of "foreigners"-foreign-born people and their chil- tural reasons to remain in the city. dren. Fully 83.4 percent of this group originated in Ireland, and their George Adams's report on the 1850 Boston census stressed the need to Catholic religion was hated and feared by many Protestants because of give wealthy people who might move to the suburbs more reasons to 48 Boston's Back Bay Why Fill the Back Bay? 49 stay in Boston. He noted that the city already provided ample water English Puritans dating from Boston's seventeenth-century origins. This piped from Lake Cochituate in Framingham and operated good public reflects the growing anti-immigrant sentiments of the time. schools. Adams went on to say that, even without landfill for residential Keeping much of the influential wealthy Protestant group in Boston areas, Boston had the potential to double its population by developing promised at least to postpone the time when Irish Catholic immigrants East Boston and South Boston, but he overlooked the fact that those would dominate the political power of the city. Creating the Back Bay as neighborhoods were too far from downtown Boston to be convenient an attractive, exclusive neighborhood close to downtown offices, Beacon for "the business class." A filled Back Bay would be an ideal location, Hill, and the new Public Garden gave promise of maintaining the "Old essentially an extension of the prestigious Beacon Hill neighborhood Yankee" character of Boston. Though Curtis does not mention the plan- and near the workplaces of many wealthy Protestants. ning for the Back Bay project, which was then under way, it was clearly The population of immigrants and their children increased at a slowed designed to keep wealthy Protestants in Boston. rate of 34.7 percent between 1850 and 1855. In the same period the "Amer- Curtis also commented favorably on efforts by Governor Henry J. ican" population barely held its own, increasing by only 0.8 percent. The Gardner of Massachusetts to reduce the influx of undesirable immi- net result of these changes was that the "foreign" population grew to rep- grants. 75 Gardner was swept into office in 1854 by the astounding success resent 53.0 percent of Boston's residents in 1855. 69 Curtis concluded, with of the American Party in Massachusetts. 76 This political party, organized a tinge of dread, that it was unlikely that, in the foreseeable future, "na- through secret lodges of Protestant men in towns and cities, attacked the live" Americans would again constitute a majority of Boston's popula- ineffectiveness of existing parties and the corruption of politicians, and tion.70 Boston would be a largely Catholic city and the Protestants' views it claimed to champion the interests of common citizens-meaning of the Catholic religion were very negative in the mid-nineteenth cen- native-born Americans, excluding American Indians. The members of lury, based on fears carried from Protestant Europe. This was the time the American Party were called "Know-Nothings" by their opponents and when "no Irish need apply" was a common discriminatory phrase in job the press because they would not reveal anything about the workings of listings in Massachusetts. their organization. The American Party's power in Massachusetts coin- In 1855, 80.2 percent of the immigrant group had Irish origins, and the cided exactly with the planning of the Back Bay landfill project: the final political implications of the growing "foreign" population were not lost plan of the State Commission was approved in 1856. The anti-immigra- on Curtis. 71 He emphasized that "native" American voters had increased tion ideology of this political party seems to have influenced the strong only 30.38 percent since 1850, but the number of "foreign" voters had al- efforts of the commission on the Back Bay and the state legislature to at- most tripled-a 194.64 percent increase. Curtis also pointed out that tract wealthy Protestant families to the new Back Bay neighborhood.7 77 "il very large number of those who do business in Boston reside out of Governor Gardner was reelected in 1855 and 1856 by smaller margins, town with their families and households (estimated at 40,000). 72 This but the American Party was weakened when Gardner took control from represents doubling in railroad commuting from the 20,000 daily com- the secret lodges because the members distrusted authority. In his 1856 muters estimated by Chickering only five years earlier. inaugural address, Gardner announced that he would not run for re- Curtis expressed concern about the 200 percent higher birthrate in election and continued to stress the dangers of immigration and the role the "foreign" population in Boston than in the "native" population since of the "horde of foreign born" in the growth of the Democratic Party. 78 1850.7 The projected impacts on the public schools and on the future Although the "Know-Nothings" lost power quickly, the desire of the State political balance of power were of deep concern to the established "Amer- government and other leaders to attract wealthy Protestants to the Back ican" population in Boston. Curtis wrote that "the native inhabitants" Bay continued unabated. should "guard with patriotic care the glorious institutions bequeathed The planning for the new Back Bay would soon demonstrate an em- by il noble ancestry"; he concluded that proper efforts should be made phasis on this desire. The layout of streets, avenues, and parks would cre- to maintain a large majority of native-born citizens in Boston. 74 The ate an elite neighborhood. Zoning restrictions and measures taken to "glorious institutions bequeathed by a noble ancestry" were the legacy of keep the prices of house lots high would maintain the high status of the 08 Boston's Back Bay Planning and Financing the Back Bay Landfill O 69 the City of Roxbury over seventy-two acres of land between the new city As the planning stage concluded and the filling process neared, an im- line and Gravelly Point (see fig. 2.4). 49 portant decision was made that would increase the success of the new The commissioners favored an elegant but simple plan with wide Back Bay neighborhood. It would have been easier to start the filling at streets in rectangular blocks. The successful plan of 1856 is generally cred- the western end of the State's land, near Exeter Street, because the gravel ited to the architect Arthur Gilman, assisted by another architect and trains would not have to go as far or to cross from the Boston and Worces- two landscape gardeners. 50 Mona Domosh tells us that Gilman's plan for ter onto the Boston and Providence tracks before swinging onto the the Back Bay was based on English precedents. She says that Gilman vis- marshland. But that approach would have created the first new land in ited London, where several of the city's most famous architects showed the middle of the polluted area, isolated completely from other residen- him the sights. He saw the new grand boulevards in London's West End, tial neighborhoods. The land would not have been in demand because particularly in Bayswater (north of Hyde Park) and Kensington (south of its bad location. Instead, the plan was set to begin filling at Arlington and west of the park). 51 Street on the State's land and to proceed westward block by block. In this Social motives are clear in the commissioners' description of how way the first land would lie near the wealthy and well-established Bea- they developed the final plan. They listened attentively to the sugges- con Hill neighborhood, the new Public Garden, Boston Common, and tions of several "gentlemen of taste and judgment" who planned to pur- downtown businesses, making it much easier to attract high-income chase lots in the new neighborhood when it was filled. 52 As a result of families to buy house lots there. Land could be sold at higher prices and this process, Commonwealth Avenue was made more than 50 percent elegant homes could be built as soon as the land was filled, with wide wider than originally planned, which was accomplished by narrowing new streets providing easy access to the rest of the city. In a similar fash- other streets and reducing the depths of lots. Commonwealth Avenue ion, the Boston Water Power Company would fill its lands from the ex- was made 200 feet wide, and there were open spaces of 20 feet in front of listing shorelines into the Back Bay, starting at the newly fashionable new the houses on each side. This made a total width of 240 feet between the South End along Tremont Street. houses for the central avenue. The increased width of Commonwealth Strong evidence of social motivations in the planning process is seen Avenue created the "mall," the middle portion dedicated to trees, shrub- in the selection of appropriate institutions for the Back Bay, and the bery, and other ornamental purposes. 53 The roadways on both sides reservation of key pieces of land for them (see fig. 3.8). A full block in a were left the same width as originally planned. prime area was set aside and donated to the Massachusetts Institute of The commission set aside about one-third of the Back Bay for public Technology and the Museum of Natural History. purposes, with the obvious motive of attracting appropriate residents. Copley Square, the most important public space after the Common- Priority was placed on establishing a good system of streets, avenues, and wealth Avenue Mall, was planned to achieve this significance with the public squares to make the territory as attractive as possible and to con- presence of the Museum of Fine Arts and two elite Protestant churches vince people to select house lots in the Back Bay. 54 Domosh argues that (Trinity Episcopal and New Old South Congregational). The massive the plan reflected the control of a small elite and was designed to benefit Boston Public Library facing Copley Square would be built in the early only that group SO that Boston could become the cultural capital of the 1890s. Other churches and institutions linked with wealthy Protestant United States. The design of the area, with Commonwealth Avenue as society built new facilities in the Back Bay, firmly establishing their place its local point and rectangular blocks, served the Protestant elite's dual in "Proper Boston." The commissioners bragged that nearly one-seventh purposes of setting themselves off from the commercial city that had a of the land that could have been sold had been donated to the city of tangle of curved streets, with the Common and Public Garden acting as Boston and to prominent institutions. 57 an effective barrier, while they remained close enough to the downtown In 1859, a year after filling began and when the first buildings were to exercise control. The elite did not flee the central portion of the city of under construction, a bold plan with a lake was put forward by George Boston en masse, as the upper class in most cities was doing at the time. 56 Snelling, a prominent Bostonian and a business partner of David Sears. Dorr Property # 18 Planning and Financing the Back Bay Landfill 71 0 1/4 Mile Under Snelling's design, there would be no Commonwealth Avenue. In- 0 1/4 Km. Boston Common stead, a narrow, long body of water would run the length of the Back Bay, Charles filling the space between Marlborough and Newbury Streets from the Beacon Public Garden Public Garden to the Cross Dam. West of the Cross Dam, the plan shows 5 the body of water extending all the way to the Mill Dam at Beacon Street. Snelling acknowledged that a few houses under construction on Arling- 14 6 15 2 ton Street would have to be removed to implement his plan. 58 The com- 12 4 missioners ignored Snelling's proposal and moved ahead rapidly on the 10 Copley filling. In 1861, the Commissioners on Public Lands replaced the Com- Square 11 8 missioners on the Back Bay.59 In 1861, five years after the State's plan was finalized and three years 90 after the filling began, David Sears reappeared and succeeded in con- vincing the state legislature to require the State Commission to negoti- ate with the Boston Water Power Company and riparian owners to in- clude a lake between the State's land and the Cross Dam. There were Gravelly Point meetings on this, but no agreement was reached, even though the State offered to pay one-third of the cost. 60 Apparently, there was little inter- est in adding a lake that would reduce the amount of land that the Boston Water Power Company could sell. Financial interests seem to have influenced David Sears in pushing FIGURE 3.8. Map showing the key cultural institutions in 1895. Placing prominent insti- tutions in the new neighborhood was an important way to attract wealthy families to the the Silver Lake plan SO long and hard. Years before, he had bought sev- Back Bay and give the area a positive image. This 1900 map shows that higher-status eral plots of land on the eastern shore of Gravelly Point, which included Protestant churches were scattered broadly throughout the Back Bay. The churches in riparian rights to large portions of the marsh extending well into the the Back Bay proper were Episcopal (Church of England), Congregational, Unitarian or Receiving Basin. An 1862 map shows "D. Sears" owning an irregularly Universalist, Baptist, and Spiritualist. The closest Catholic Church was tucked outside shaped area roughly equal to the hundred acres controlled by the State. the southwest corner of the area, near Massachusetts Avenue, among stables and other David Sears is designated as the owner of about three-fourths of the lots service buildings. Educational institutions included the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology, Harvard Medical School, and several Boston public schools. The Museum of in the Back Bay west of the future Exeter Street between Boylston Street Natural History and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts occupied prominent locations. and Commonwealth Avenue (see fig. 3.9). 61 The Boston Public Library was added to Copley Square in 1895 after earlier apartment Creating a large lake near the middle of the Back Bay would have left buildings were removed from Dartmouth Street. David Sears owning much of the valuable land on the lake's western shore. Institutions and Churches in the Back Bay in 1900: After the State paid for the cost of most of the landfill project, Sears 1. Arlington Street Church 8. Museum of Fine Arts , Museum of Natural History could sell his land to wealthy buyers at a very large profit. 9. Boston Public Library 1. Church of the Covenant 10. New Old South Church The push for Silver Lake lived on and, late in 1865, George Snelling Massadisens Institute of Technology 11. Harvard Medical School visited the commission offices to make another, even more drastic pro- The First Church in Boston 12. First Spiritualist Temple posal to build a lake. Snelling wanted to improve the health of Boston by First Baptist Church 11. Prince School removing many of the structures now standing on land sold by the com- Trinity Church 14. Algonquin Club missioners and to excavate il magnificent lake covering a few acres. This 15. Mount Vernon Church would have meant that many new brick and stone mansions would be (Mapworks ID 2005.) destroyed. Snelling told the commissioners that he had done his best to 72 o Boston's Back Bay Planning and Financing the Back Bay Landfill 73 Among other issues, the resolve called for making some funds available Mill Dam before any land was sold by allowing the governor to draw up to ten thou- sand dollars from the state treasury to be used by the commissioners for the initial filling. 64 A short time later, the resolve was revised, with the Commonwealth only change being that the governor's power to draw the cash had been removed. Therefore, the State Legislature stipulated that, until land sales began, no money at all would be taken from the treasury for the project Boyiston St. except to cover incidental expenses of the commission. The commission- ers would have to find ways to fill the former tidal marsh economically Gravely Point David Sears with innovative approaches to financing so the project would not bur- den the taxpayers. From the beginning, the commissioners faced a dilemma when the Crafts Hathaway State Legislature refused to provide any start-up money for commenc- ing the landfill process. The contractors' bids in 1857 had called for start- up payments so they could assemble their equipment and workers; with- out this, the cost per cubic yard for filling the area would have been D. Sears much higher. The commissioners' solution in 1857 was to sell a large piece of unfilled land on Beacon Street about a year before the contrac- tors began to fill the marsh. This land, in the first block of Beacon Street between Arlington and Berkeley Streets, would be filled by the two PIGURE Map showing large plots of David Sears's land and the Craft and Hathaway lot in the Back Bay. A large part of the land between the State's section of the Back Bay wealthy buyers; the proceeds of the sale could be used to pay the initial and Gravelly Point belonged to Sears by ripparian rights in the former tidal basin. This fees of the contractors to cover start-up costs. This first plot of land was in reage promised to become very valuable after filling turned the Back Bay into a sold at a very low price, $70,000 for 1.5 acres, most of a well-located block, wealthy neighborhood. An oval lake in the Back Bay would have put much of the lake's only about $1.05 per square foot. 65 The commissioners were accused of western shore on Sears's land. favoritism and selling the land too cheaply, but their actions were found to be proper. The commissioners defended the sale by stating that the prevent the sales of land. His proposal that his plan should be presented high status of the buyers, William W. Goddard and T. Bigelow Lawrence, by the commission to the next legislature was declined on the day of his would improve the chances of success for the landfill project and gener- visit and nothing more was heard of a lake in the Back Bay. 62 ate large amounts of money for the State. 66 The last change in state control of the Back Bay project came in 1877 The commission's report for 1861 detailed the cautious approach and when the Commissioners on Public Lands were abolished and their duties the slow beginning of land sales intended to maximize the long-term were transferred to the Massachusetts Board of Land Commissioners. 63 positive outcomes. At first the contractors, George Goss and Norman C. Munson, were paid in land rather than in cash because funds could not be drawn from the State treasury. For a few years after the first sale to Financing the Landfill Process and Land Sale Policies Goddard and Lawrence, much more new land was paid to the contrac- lors than was sold to the public by the State. In 1858, the first year of People today often assume that taxes or government bonds financed the filling, 261,632 square feet went to Goss and Munson, valued at $305,000, cost of the huge Back Bay landfill project. Early in 1856 the commission- or $1.17 per square foot; this was treated as a cash payment to the con- ers proposed a resolve to be debated and voted by the state legislature. tractors equaling their charges for the work. The contractors then began 1.1 Boston's Back Bay Planning and Financing the Back Bay Landfill 75 selling their land as fast as they could to pay expenses and to make a The legislature authorized the issuing of scrip and required selling profit. In 1858 the State sold only 54,832 square feet for $101,281, an aver- new land by public auction after May 4, 1860. All state land had to be sold age of $1.85 per square foot. The demand for land was even lower in 1859, at public auction until April 1879 (see fig. 3.10). The first auction was ad- and only two lots on Commonwealth Avenue were sold by the State; they vertised in a catalogue dated October 24, 1860, and the bids were opened totaled 6,972 square feet at $17,430, an average of $2.50 per square foot. on December 1 of that year. 72 Each auction offered house lots in a few The State's only sale early in 1860 was a strip three and a half feet wide to sections of filled land, and the minimum bids were set at specific prices increase a lot purchased in 1858. 67 per square foot for particular lots. Strict zoning restrictions were placed This situation posed a very serious problem: the State was competing on the houses to be built and limited other uses of the land. In 1860, in with the contractors to sell land. By March 1860 there had been so few all, private sales by the State accounted for 213,952 square feet sold for an land sales during the preceding fourteen months that the commission- average of $1.58 per square foot, and 126,701 square feet were sold at auc- ers had hardly any resources for carrying on the work. The contractors tion for an average of $1.91 per square foot. 73 had been paid with large quantities of land and had been able to com- More auctions were held by the Commissioners on Public Lands at pete in the market by selling land at prices starting at $1.71 per square scattered intervals over the next several years. In all, twenty-four auction foot. Meanwhile, the commissioners held out for prices of $2.50 on sales were held, and about three-fifths of all the State land was sold in Commonwealth Avenue and $1.50 on the side streets. They could not sell this way. 74 For example, there was the "Catalogue of 19 Lots of Land on State land at these prices because similar house lots were available at the Back Bay Belonging to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, front- much lower prices from the contractors. 68 ing upon Commonwealth Avenue and Marlborough Street to be sold at This 1861 report shows that the State faced unfair competition for the public auction, on Tuesday, October 21, 1862, at 11 o'clock, A.M., on the sale of land from Goss and Munson, and this created a serious problem premises, by order of Franklin Haven, E. C. Purdy, Charles Hale (Com- when demand was low, as it was in the late 1850s and early 186os. Goss missioners on Public Lands)." The auctioneer was N. Thompson and and Munson received prime lots near the Public Garden as payment for Company. The auction catalogue has a fine map of the Back Bay that the filling work, which left some of the less desirable land for the State to names only Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, and Dedham (later changed sell. The State could not sell land at the prices it felt would guarantee to Dartmouth) Streets crossing Commonwealth Avenue. The auction only high-status buyers, and so it held newly filled land off the market. offered ten lots on the south side of Commonwealth Avenue: a corner lot Therefore, the commissioners did not have the money they needed to with a minimum bid of $2.75 per square foot and nine other lots at mini- push the filling ahead as fast as possible. mum bids of $2.25. There were also one lot on the north side of Common- The commissioners appealed to the legislature in January 1860, sug- wealth Avenue with a minimum bid set at $2.25 per square foot and eight gesting issuing scrip (paper money issued for temporary, emergency lots on Marlborough Street with minimum bids of $1.38. 75 use) to continue the filling before more sales could be made. This request When enough money had flowed into the State treasury after a few was referred to the Committee on Finance. After a delay, the commis- years, the commissioners began to pay the contractor in cash or mort- sioners' proposal was denied and they were forced to sell land to obtain gages rather than in land, which gave the State more land to sell. The funds. In 1859 an offer to buy a large plot of land on Commonwealth Boston Water Power Company followed the same pattern as the State, Avenue at an average cost of $1.75 per square foot had been rejected. This paying the contractors in land for the first few years and then shifting to offer was then accepted in 1860, and the buyer agreed to build immedi- cash or mortgages. ately enough first-class residences to establish the character of the new Land sales were strictly regulated by the State Commission to keep the neighborhood. These moves first to demand higher prices, and then to sales prices high and to attract wealthy buyers as the filling of land pro- place stipulations on the land sale that would guarantee a wealthy set of ceeded. The commission sold segments of the filled land at irregular in- new homeowners, are direct evidence of the social motivations under- tervals in an effort to keep the prices up. In years when demand was low, lying the project. no land was sold at all. This first occurred in 1861, although the filling 188 Boston's Back Bay Epilogue 189 The Back Bay today contributes to the social and cultural life of Boston Back Bay survives in spite of negatives such as parking shortages, crowded in very significant ways. The French Library and the Goethe Institute are conditions, rush-hour traffic, and overloaded public transportation. venerable institutions committed to preserving European cultures and The initial success of the Back Bay in the nineteenth century resulted languages. Several private clubs continue to have active schedules of ac- from the successful sale of house lots to wealthy families. The buyers then tivities and draw their memberships from the whole metropolitan area. engaged architects and planned elegant mansions in the latest French Historic Protestant churches maintain active religious and social service styles. Homes were built over the span of a few decades, and SO attractive programs in the Back Bay. The Christian Science Church complex occu- streetscapes were created along the new, tree-lined streets. Common- pies an impressive site near the southwest corner of the area. Only Saint wealth Avenue and its leafy mall established the elegance of the Back Bay Cecelia's Church, between the Prudential Center and Massachusetts Av- with its Old-World flavor. This narrow park would later be connected to enue, serves the Catholic population; there are no Jewish synagogues. a string of green spaces stretching out to Franklin Park known as Boston's The Boston Public Library in Copley Square, the first free public library "Emerald Necklace"; the Back Bay is thus an important link in the park in the United States, is a center for research, and an active program of ed- system that starts with Boston Common and the Public Garden. ucational lectures and other events is held in its Rabb Auditorium. Just Prestigious Protestant churches followed their members into the new outside the original Receiving Basin, Symphony Hall and three music Back Bay, building solid stone structures in Gothic and Romanesque colleges are clustered near Massachusetts Avenue; they play central roles styles. Key educational and cultural institutions in the Back Bay solidified in Boston's cultural life. its image in the first decades: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Commonwealth Avenue Mall and the Charles River Esplanade the Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard provide attractive parkland. These areas of green space and water in the Medical School, and more. Early in the twentieth century, Symphony heart of a great city add to the Back Bay's image and attract many people Hall, the Opera House, the New England Conservatory of Music, and for relaxation. Summertime concerts on the Esplanade and in Copley the Gardner Museum were located in the nearby Fenway area. Square are popular, crowned by the famous and very popular Fourth of Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Back Bay established it- July Boston Pops concerts. The Charles River, formerly a tidal estuary, self as a very successful, wealthy, residential neighborhood. A rich social has been cleaned to a great degree, so it is more attractive than ever for and cultural life was maintained by the neighborhood's "Proper Boston- rowing, sailing, and even sailboarding, which often dumps participants ian" families. Victorian values and lifestyles thrived in the men's and into the water. women's clubs, schools and cultural organizations for children, classical The current success of the Back Bay derives largely from factors stem- music and theatrical venues, parties, balls, musical evenings in private ming from the planning and development work done in the nineteenth homes, and rounds of "at home" visiting by women of the higher class. century. The location continues to be very popular-close to workplaces The Back Bay neighborhood entered a period of decline by 1920, which in the downtown and to Back Bay businesses, near restaurants and the- only deepened after the stock market crash in 1929. Soon after 1910, MIT, afters, and adjacent to Beacon Hill, the Public Garden, and Boston Com- the Museum of Fine Arts, and Harvard Medical School moved to new mon. The construction of nineteenth-century mansions initially set the locations where they could have larger facilities and generous acreage pattern for Back Bay development, which is maintained to the present that would allow future expansion. In the 1920S the automobile and im- day. The older buildings are continually renovated internally and up- proved roads serving Boston's suburbs induced many wealthy families to dated while the distinctive architecture is preserved carefully, as it would move outside the city, where they could build large homes on expansive be in a historic district setting. lots. The exodus of leading families drained much of the cultural and so- Universities and colleges near the Back Bay are thriving, contributing cial vitality out of the neighborhood. This reduced the prestige of the to the spending in local stores and adding to demand for housing and Back Bay and put housing on the market when there was not much de- services. Students and other young Bostonians keep the nightlife lively mand for homes in the city. Back Bay residential buildings started sell- on the Back Bay's commercial streets. The very positive image of the ing for lower prices, and so began a downward spiral. 190 e Boston's Back Bay Epilo, 191 For several decades, many of the Back Bay's town houses originally ous problems lie in the environmental realm. Falling water tal in cer- occupied by single families were broken up into small apartments that tain areas threaten the foundations of buildings resting on wom piles. were rented to clerical workers and young, middle-class workers. The Corrosive gas from former pollution remains in some place: severe building exteriors and public spaces became shabby, as the owners and earthquake near Boston, while not likely, could knock down ny older the City were less able to maintain them. The Back Bay suffered from the brick and stone buildings on the unstable land of the Back Bayd cause Great Depression of the 1930s as professional and business jobs declined injury and death. in Boston. The continued movement of families to the suburbs and to On balance, the future looks very bright for Boston's Backy after middle-class neighborhoods deepened the ongoing deterioration of the its first century and a half. People of the twenty-first century 2 much neighborhood. to the planners, inventors, contractors, architects, and build of the The Back Bay began to rebound in the early 1960s because more pro- Back Bay neighborhood. The most ambitious landfill project ! urban fessionals valued urban living and convenience to their jobs. At the same development effort of the nineteenth century will long contir to en- time, urban renewal in Boston sparked an interest in the city. The Vault, hance Boston's living conditions and image. an organization of business leaders, promoted redevelopment of the city and helped bring in tax breaks for new construction projects. The Back Bay benefited early and strongly from the growth of the "New Boston" after profits from high-tech industries began to be invested in Boston. In 1965 a new office tower, modern apartments, and a convention center were completed on the site of a large railroad-switching yard that stretched from Boylston Street to Huntington Avenue. This Prudential Center development was followed by construction of the Sheraton Hotel and the John Hancock Tower by the early 1970s. Spurred by these im- provements in the Back Bay, gentrification took hold gradually. Most of the elegant Victorian residential buildings have been renovated to very high standards. In recent decades, more and more professionals have moved into the neighborhood and the comeback seems to be complete. Looking into the future of the Back Bay, there is no end in sight for the high demand and housing prices that have been in effect for some time. Tourism, business travel, and small- to moderate-sized conferences are expected to keep the neighborhood's hotels and restaurants busy. Location is the key to value and success in real estate, and the Back Bay has an ideal location. Since only limited land remains open for develop- ment, future construction is likely on air rights over the Massachusetts Turnpike and railroad both east of Copley Place and west of the Pruden- tial Center. Older buildings of lower value will probably be razed from time to time for new construction projects. Nearby universities are ex- pected to continue to thrive and to have positive effects on the Back Bay. The planning and confidence of the creators of the Back Bay have generally stood the test of time. Attractive streets and architecture con- tinue to shape the image of the neighborhood. The only remaining seri- George Casper Homans. (1910-1989) THE BACK BAY Coming to my Senses. Sociologists are preoccupied not only with class but with ethnic differences. I was preoccupied with both long before I became a New Brongwich, NJ: sociologist. Perhaps more than any other American city, Boston had from the beginning been divided by the irregularities of its hills and waterfront Transaction, Inc., 1984. into distinct neighborhoods or "urban villages." As the city expanded with the great immigration of the nineteenth century, new people took over the neighborhoods from those who had occupied them before, but the neighborhoods themselves remained and even increased in number: Beacon Hill, the Back Bay, the North, South, and West Ends, East and South Boston, Charlestown, etc. Moreover ethnic differences had come in to reinforce what I suspect had once chiefly been class differences between the districts. The Irish Catholics had come to dominate Boston politics, but they were by no means the only immigrants. I was born just at the time the tide of immigration flowed strongest, and now it flowed less from Ireland than from Italy and Russian Jewry. The sour smell of Italian laborers filled the subways. The recent newcomers could speak hardly any English, and they tended to settle near compatriots who arrived earlier, protected by ward bosses for a price in votes. In short, the "urban villages" tended also to become "ethnic islands." The concentrations of the immigrants tended indirectly to encourage the concentration of the descendants of the earlier arrivals. Thus the Homanses lived in winter on an ethnic island, largely Yankee, which was also a class island, largely Brahmin, This island consisted of two linked parts: the "Hill," really the western slope of Beacon Hill leading up to the State House, and the "Back Bay," the flatland to the westward. The Hill had and still has great charm, with small, steep streets lined with houses often of great distinction, since they were pre-Victorian. Because we did not live on the Hill until late in my teens, my experience of living on a class and ethnic island came first and most strongly from my earlier life in various parts of the Back Bay. The Back Bay was so- called because for the first two centuries of Boston's history it was "back," that is, westward, of the main part of the city, and a "bay" because it consisted of salt marsh flooded at high tide. 13 14 Coming to My Senses The Back Bay 15 As the city expanded in the middle of the nineteenth century, matter of servants that the life I lived then differed most from the one I speculators filled in the Back Bay and began to cover it with houses built live now; though we children loved some of our maids, I am not sure that on piles driven through the fill and mud. In my youth there were still a the change has been for the worse. few vacant lots, on which we played. Socially, the Back Bay was a When we lived in the Back Bay, single families occupied almost all the rectangle, bounded on the north by the Charles River Basin, on the south houses. Many of the families, but not ours, also owned houses in the by Boylston Street and the yards of the Boston and Albany Railroad, on country, which they used in spring and fall, and all who possibly could the east by the Public Garden, and on the west by the Fenway, originally got away to the mountains or the sea for the summer. But they still spent called the Muddy River. It was laid out in the conventional grid. The cross the winter in Boston. The men walked downtown to work. The great streets were alphabetized by naming them after British peerages-and ladies-not my mother but, say, my Aunt Fanny Adams-were still this was characteristic of the tone of upper-class Boston: Arlington, driven to Tremont and Washington Streets in their Packards, Pierce- Berkeley, Clarendon, etc. The great lengthwise street was Common- Arrows, or Cadillacs by liveried chauffeurs, who waited while they did wealth Avenue, which had a dual carriageway with a grass mall in their shopping. between, shaded with great elms and studded with statues of American The Back Bay was also what is now called an urban village. Not only worthies, from George Washington on horseback looking down the mall did single families occupy most of the houses but we knew many of from the Public Garden in the east to a highly improbable Leif Ericsson at them, not all of course but some in nearly every block. What is more, the other end shading his eyes at the dazzling prospect of Vinland the many of the families had known one another for generations. The surest Good--in fact the Muddy River and the squalor of Kenmore Square. sign of it was that, when I met some lady or gentleman hitherto unknown Most of the houses of the Back Bay were built in the period 1850-1900, to me, she or he would be sure to say: "George Homans? Oh, yes, of which, in spite of a number of interesting, indeed fantastic, variations, course, you must be Abigail's [or Robert's] se and then go on to climb gave them a certain consistency. Commonwealth Avenue might even be down the family trees until the branches met in some common ancestor. called distinguished. But in its cities New England never felt it ought to Like class and ethnicity, I learned about extended kinship early. I never show off, as New York or Washington did. None of the houses on knew a time when I felt I was a social isolate, when I was not an insider, Commonwealth Avenue, not even my Uncle Charlie Adams's, with its when I had no social identity. My ethnic identity remained more double staircase leading up to a piano nobile, ever seemed to me to count precarious. as a really great house, and most of the other houses in the Back Bay seem Thanks largely to zoning laws, the exterior appearance of the Back Bay today to have been positively mean or shoddy.1 today remains recognizably much as it was then. Physical decay has gone Such was the house in which my family lived longest, at 289 only a little further. But otherwise it is a whited sepulcher; its social Marlborough Street. It was very narrow and dark but still five-stories interior has been gutted. The automobile has done its worst. Most of the high, looking out in the rear over a squalid backyard and alley. On the kind of families that then lived in the Back Bay have moved permanently lower floors it was only one smallish room wide; on the upper ones two to the country, and their members drive or commute to work. The houses even smaller bedrooms could barely be cramped in. Narrow steep stairs have been divided into rented flats or condominiums, often occupied by led from one floor to the next. Characteristically the kitchen lay below the the most transient of residents, such as students. My only hope is that the ground level. If one went down there at night and turned the light on, better sections of old Boston may be partly restored by the price of swarms of cockroaches scuttled for safety. Here our long series of cooks gasoline, which may bring some of the old types of resident back. This is sweated over the black coal-range. From this hellhole our food was sent the process now called by the nasty name of "gentrification." up by a dumbwaiter, and supposed to stay warm, to the pantry next to Since we knew many other families, our mothers dragged us to many the dining room on the floor above. At the very top floor of the house, parties, usually birthday parties, of our contemporaries, the boys in blue crammed into their tiny cells, with no hot water, lived-if that is the right serge suits topped by those choking, stiff, Eton collars that flared on top word for their existence-our uniformly Irish maids. I can only hope that of one's jacket, the girls, only a little less shy than ourselves, in black their conditions were at least better than those they had known in velvet dresses with blue sashes and lace collars. We played blindman's Ireland. Including our cook, I think there were three of them. It is in the buff, pinned the tail on the donkey, fished for presents-when much to 16 Coming to My Senses The Back Bay 17 my mother's embarrassment I complained loudly if I did not get what I christened there. This was King's Chapel in downtown Boston, just a wanted. We slurped ice cream, always covered with spun sugar, snapped short walk over Beacon Hill from the Back Bay. The only service we our crackers, and put on our paper caps. always went to was the so-called Children's Service on Easter afternoon, But just as in Harlem today, we children played mostly in the streets. In when the chancel was surrounded by flowers in pots, and at the end of spring, when the ground dried, we played marbles on the miserable grass the service each youngster got one to take home. For Easter we would all plots in front of our houses. Our own became SO much a center of of course wear our best clothes. I had to wear my strangulating Eton congregation for the children of our block that all our grass, whose collar. Father was very grand in a "cutaway" and a tali silk hat, carrying a attachment to life was feeble at best, was killed. Later we played baseball gold-headed cane. in the middle of the street, cars still being few enough to make that Outwardly King's Chapel is forbidding: square in body, with a squat, possible. In winter the snow was not plowed but packed down, and we square tower, built of big square blocks of stone almost black with the amused ourselves by catching rides on the runners of the big horse- grime of centuries. But its interior is ravishing in its Georgian elegance. drawn sledges called pungs. At Halloween there was no damned Many churches in London are graced with the same elegance, and King's nonsense about "trick or treat," nor did our parents nervously shepherd Chapel was modeled on them. It got its name because it was originally us from door to door "trick-or-treating." Boys were expected to be the church of the royal governor and garrison of the Province of mischievous, though not vicious, and all we did was play tricks. There Massachusetts Bay. Hence, unlike the other churches of colonial Boston, was a method of folding a sheet of paper SO that it would briefly hold which were of Puritan origin and thus what we should now call water. From the roof of our house we would launch these "water-bombs" Congregational, King's Chapel belonged to the Church of England. After at passersby on the sidewalk below. In those days some men still wore, General Washington drove the royal government and garrison out of not for ceremonial occasions but for everyday use, tall silk hats, irre- Boston, the church, while keeping its name, was taken over by one of the verently called "plug" or "stovepipe" hats. One obviously scored 100 if earliest Unitarian congregations in New England, SO that it rejected both one hit one of these with a waterbomb. I never succeeded. Episcopalianism and Congregationalism. King's Chapel was in my time Like children and adolescents everywhere, we formed gangs, in theory and still is Unitarian. hostile to one another. We climbed along the rickety wooden fences Our minister dressed in a black gown with white bands at the neck, SO separating the backyards from the back alleys that ran parallel to, and that he looked in the pulpit-I always hoped he would be crushed by the between, the longitudinal streets of the Back Bay. We committed minor great sounding board precariously suspended above it-as New England delinquencies and talked big about committing major ones. But we did no clergymen must have looked for many generations. But what he damage to persons and little to property. We never got into trouble with preached was certainly not Calvinism. Many jokes have been made about the police, who were big, genial Irishmen, pounding their beats under tall Unitarianism: that it believes in the Fatherhood of God and the Brother- grey helmets modeled on those of London bobbies. My own gang was hood of Man in the Neighborhood of Boston, and that it addresses its the smallest in the neighborhood, and we crept about by stealth, as if we prayers neither to God nor our Lord Jesus Christ (and certainly not to the should be in danger when we ran into others. Thus we manufactured our Blessed Virgin Mary) but rather "to whom it may concern." own excitement, for if there had been a confrontation I doubt that we To speak more seriously, I came in time to recognize that what our should have had to take much more than verbal abuse. The boys and girls minister preached was the gospel according to Ralph Waldo Emerson. of the Back Bay were really very "nice" kids compared to some upper- This gospel, if too optimistic, is at least concerned with the saving of class WASP youngsters I met later. I do not mean that they were sissies, souls. Should you doubt it, read the essay on self-reliance. Since then but only that they were for the most part reasonably honest, fair, and Unitarianism has become utterly sentimental, concerned not with the generous. I cannot remember a single bully or son-of-a-bitch among salvation of individuals but with the material needs of groups of one kind them. My experience of such people was not to come from the Back Bay. or another, as these needs are defined by well-meaning "liberal" out- From the Back Bay we sallied forth occasionally to go to church. siders. Of all types of religious belief-if indeed it be religious belief- Neither of my parents was deeply religious, SO our churchgoing was far this is the one, the religion of sentimental humanitarianism, that I now from regular. My father went for largely sentimental reasons, for his hold in the greatest contempt. For me Jesus Christ came into the world to church was the one his family had attended in his youth. I myself was save sinners not society. The only advantage of sentimental humanitaria- 18 Coming to My Senses The Back Bay 19 nism is that any church adopting it as a doctrine is pretty sure to destroy Though there were a few blacks in Boston, largely in the South End- itself. our much admired laundress was a black-they had been there for a long For me, without yet knowing why, the service, the ritual, of the church time and, though certainly not integrated, they had become an accepted was much more important than the formal doctrine. A Unitarian part of the community. The great immigration from the South had not yet congregation is free to adopt any kind of service it likes. In practice, begun, and I never came into contact with a black youth. Sunday morning service in King's Chapel was the old Morning Prayer of We youngsters did not articulate the social ideas we learned in the the Church of England, which derives from Cranmer's Prayer Book. The Back Bay. Had we done so, they might have sounded something like this: Unitarians made only a few changes, but these my father delighted in "We are a group, the Yankees, and we are different from other ethnic pointing out. "George," he would say, "it is just the Book of Common groups. Not only are we different, we are better than the others, Prayer with all references to the Trinity and to miserable sinners taken especially in a lingering respect for intellectual attainments even on the out. We Unitarians just cannot bring ourselves to admit we are miserable part of those of us who have not acquired them. We are perhaps worse sinners." I have since come to believe that some doctrine of original sin is than other groups in our reluctance to fight. Yet is our betterness really crucial to the survival of any religion, and that it would be well for betterness when it has done us SO little good? We have lost political power everyone, everywhere, to recite once a day the General Confession of the in Boston and even our control of the State House is in jeopardy. It is only Church of England, which puts the matter succinctly: "We have left a question of time before we lose our other superiorities. Our financial undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done power may be the last to go. Nor is it merely a question of our superiority: those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in our very identity is at stake. We are a great group with a great history, but us." At King's Chapel we were at least not denied the glories of the Book we are bound to disappear as surely as Cooper's Mohicans." We had also of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. They have abided with me. learned not to be quite so sentimental about the proletariat as some of our From Boston's beginning the youths of the neighborhoods had fought later, Marxist, friends affected to be. After all we had suffered at its with one another whenever they found any ghost of a pretext. So it was hands. with us. Though the neighborhoods had distinct and recognized borders, My later experience has reversed some of these inarticulate judgments. there were places where the youngsters of the different groups came into How could we have been SO worried? In a strange way we Yankees have contact. When we Yankees coasted on the Common or skated on the won, not lost, and won in a way I never conceived in my youth. Who Basin or the pond of the Public Garden, we became conscious of other would have believed then that parochial schools would be closing, not youngsters of a decidedly rougher and, to us, nastier cast than our own, opening, that the once-conquering Catholic Church would be hard put to youngsters who found little trouble and much pleasure in pushing us fill her seminaries, that her newer churches would look for all the world around-though they never used knives as their successors might today. like colonial meetinghouses, and that in them the priest would repeat the They did not come from the Back Bay or the Hill, and we referred to them Mass-which I bet will soon be called Holy Communion-in English collectively as "muckers." and facing the congregation? Of course it is our culture not our numbers The muckers we came into closest contact with were not Irish but that has won. It is not the old Yankee culture, but then that too had been Italians from the neighborhood closest to us, that is, the West End-west changing and was bound in any event to change further. Still, it is a in relation to old Boston but actually east of the Back Bay. Sometimes descendant whose cultural genes have more Yankee in them than groups of them invaded the Back Bay looking for trouble. One such anything else. In the process much has been lost. For instance, the Irish group, three in number, caught me alone in the dead end of a back alley have given up their lovely brogue for the most nasal of Yankee dialects. and beat me up to the extent of a couple of black eyes. Naturally I had Perhaps all I am saying is that I should never have believed that we would offered them no provocation, especially because I was both small and all become so American, though our convergence still has far to go. weak for my age. To them my appearance alone must have constituted Perhaps we were even then more American than we thought. The sufficient provocation. I expect they judged I was a sissy, whose relatively Boston Brahmins believed they were different, especially in their intellec- fancy clothes positively yearned for a fist. The West End as a well- tual cultivation, and other Americans, while making fun of Brahmin integrated Italian community has since been destroyed by one of the pretensions, believed SO too. Yet when I compare my childhood with earliest and worst examples of "urban renewal." what I have read or been told about the childhoods of my contemporaries to 19-22 FirstSearch: Dissertation Abstracts Online Detailed Record Page 1 of 2 OC LC FirstSearch COLGATE UNIV Dissertation Abstracts Online Detailed Record Click on a checkbox to mark a record to be e-mailed or printed in Marked Records. Home Databases Searching Results Staff View My Account Options Comments Exit Hide tips List of Records Detailed Record Marked Records Saved Records Go to page ? Dissertation Abstracts Online results for: ti: brahmins. Record 3 of 8. E-mail Print Export Help 3 Mark: Prev Next GET THIS ITEM Availability: THE Connect to the catalog at Colgate University Libraries External Resources: MY Loan FIND RELATED More Like This: Advanced options Title: THE FORGING OF A NEW UPPER CLASS AT BOSTON'S BACK BAY, 1850-1941 (MASSACHUSETTS, BRAHMINS) Author(s): KAWASHIMA, KOHEI Degree: PH.D. Year: 1992 Pages: 00421 Institution: BROWN UNIVERSITY; 0024 Advisor: Adviser: HOWARD P. CHUDACOFF Source: DAI, 53, no. 11A, (1992): 4057 Abstract: This study demonstrates that a new upper class emerged in Boston's Back Bay area toward the end of the nineteenth century. The formation of this new class was based upon the union between descendants of the antebellum elite group, the so-called "Brahmins," and nouveau-riche industrialists and professionals who rose to power and eminence during the Gilded Age. These two groups not only lived in the same neighborhood, but also formally and informally interacted with each other through various forms of networks, including correspondence, club and church membership, professions, and marriage. As a result of these multi-layered interactions, Boston elites in the Back Bay came to hold distinct images and perceptions of their residential area http://0-firstsearch.oclc.org.library.colgate.edu/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=fullrecord:sessionid=fsapp3-53831-f0817ww3-rat2op... 4/7/2007 FirstSearch: Dissertation Abstracts Online Detailed Record Page 2 of 2 and themselves. These developments underlay the formation of the Back Bay upper class. This study's particular contribution to American historical scholarship lies at least in the following two points. First, it provides a new perspective in looking at the fortune of Boston elites between 1870 and 1930, Opposing recent Brahmin scholars' interpretation of this period as the Brahmins' "twilight," my study argues that the Brahmins' encounter with newcomers produced a much more positive and creative movement. Second, this study focuses on human interactions in the fashionable neighborhood an aspect which preceding studies of the Back Bay have rarely explored. Sources for my study include Back Bay residents' journals, letters, published works, and statistical information deriving from the Boston Blue Book, Social Register, City Directories, and others. Computer software Excel and HyperCard are used for drawing 46 tables, 7 maps, and 33 charts. SUBJECT(S) Descriptor: HISTORY, UNITED STATES SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT Accession No: AAG9308830 Database: Dissertations Dissertation Abstracts Online results for: ti: brahmins. Record 3 of 8. E-mail Print Export Help English Español Français Options Comments Exit OC © 1992-2007 OCLC LC Terms & Conditions http://0-firstsearch.oclc.org.library.colgate.edu/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=fullrecord:sessionid=fsapp3-53831-f08i7ww3-rat2op...4/7/2007 Allan Gapler, "Building Boston's Back Bay: Marriage of Money and Hygiene" Historical Journal of Massachusetts Volume 23, No. 1 (Winter 1995): 61-78, Building Boston's Back Bay: Marriage of Money and Hygiene Allan S. Galper The filling of the Back Bay in Boston was perhaps the 1 greatest achievement in American city planning in the nineteenth century. The residential area created by this ambitious urban design project boasts the most complete display of American architecture from the second half of the nineteenth century that still stands today.2 2 Much can be learned not only from the district's architecture but from the way in which the waters of the Back Bay were transformed into lots of solid land suitable for houses. Despite some setbacks, this process was a paradigm of joint civic effort on the parts of the state, the city, and private interests. Although the unifying factor may have been maximization of financial profits, a sincere desire to improve the physical and intellectual health of the city brought these disparate interests together as well. These motives dictated a very specific type of plan, which was accompanied by a particular form of 1. Bainbridge Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay: An Architectural History, 1840-1917 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 2; Bainbridge Bunting, "The Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIII (1954): 19-24; Lewis Mumford, Back Bay Boston: The City as a Work of Art (Boston, 1969), pp. 18-35. 2. Walter Muir Whitehill, Boaton: A Topographical History (Cambridge, 1968), p. 235. - 61 - 62 Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter, 1995 architecture. The French influence which is apparent in both of these aspects of the Back Bay construction reflects the transition then taking place in Boston, as the city began to follow the Parisian model of planning and design, with hopes of becoming the cultural center of the United States, and one of the greatest cities in the world. Before the turn of the nineteenth century, Boston was nothing more than the Shawmut Peninsula, consisting of 783 acres (about one square mile), and prevented from being an island only by the Neck, a narrow isthmus of land that connected the town to the Roxbury mainland. 3 Numbering only 18,320 in 1790, the people of Boston did not even inhabit most of the land in their possession, 4 but this quickly changed. The year 1800 saw the beginning of the encroachment of land upon water, or what Walter Muir Whitehill calls "Cutting Down the Hills to Fill the Coves," the great chapter of Boston history that continues to this day.5 The three hills of the Trimountain, or Tremont, of which only Beacon Hill partly remains today, were carted away to fill in the coves and inlets created by the irregularly-shaped Charles River and Boston Harbor. Starting in 1807, the Mill Pond, originally created by damming the North Cove in 1643 to generate water-power for local mills, was filled in.° This process would lead to an even greater undertaking destined to transform the city of Boston. In 1814, the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation decided to construct a granite-faced earthen dam, fifty feet wide and one and a half miles long, from the western corner of the Common to the eastern shore of Brookline, at what was called Sewall's Point (now the site of Kenmore Square). 7 The original 3. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 5; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 22; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 19; Mumford, Back Bay Boston, p. 18. The Neck was only 1,000 feet wide at low tide, but it was almost inundated at extreme high tide. See Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 466 (fn. 19). 4. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 71; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 22-23. 5. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, chapter four. 6. Ibid., p. 79. 7. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 90; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 33; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 19. Building Boston's Back Bay 63 charter allows the corporation to maintain the dam forever, construct a toll road on top of it, and build any necessary structures on or near it. 8 So began the filling in of the Back Bay. A dam was then constructed across Gravelly Point, in Roxbury, joining the mill dam and thus dividing the now-enclosed waters of the Back Bay into two basins. The smaller full basin would collect the tidal flow of the Charles River and then direct the water past the mills constructed on the promontory and into the receiving basin, from where the water would be released back into the Charles River. 10 health By the 1840s, the dams on the Charleshad-created a serious health hazard. The ebb and flow of the tidal flats left the sewage that was dumped in the basins exposed to the sun and open air. In addition, the Mill Corporation's project did not prove to be as lucrative as originally expected. Textile mills along the Merrimack River and the advent of the steam engine made the Gravelly Point Mills obsolete, and in 1834 the water-power of the incoming tide was greatly diminished by the construction of two sets of embankments and trestles in the shape of a St. Andrew's cross that accommodated the booming railroad traffic that traversed the Back Bay. 11 Thus, in 1850, the state appointed three commissioners to "consider what measures can be taken for the improvement of the said flats or land, so as to make them most valuable to all parties interested therein.' A new use for the Back Bay was about to be initiated. Many factors pointed to filling in the Back Bay as the wisest solution. Boston experienced a tremendous population explosion in the first half of the nineteenth century. From a small 8. "Final Report of the Commissioners appointed under the Resolves concerning Boston Harbor and Back Bay, approved May third, 1850," Mass. Senate Document No. 45 (1852), pp. 5-9, cited henceforth as Senate Document No. 45 (1852). 9. Although Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 55, does recount the filling in of marshy flats to erect buildings for ropewalks at the western edge of the Common, in 1794, the Mill Dam construction represents the first significant encroachment of land upon water in the Back Bay. 10. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 92; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 33. 11. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, pp. 100-102; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 33; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 19. 12. Resolves of the Mass. Senate, Chapter 111, 1850. 64 Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter, 1995 seaport of 24,397 in 1800, and 58,277 in 1825, it grew to become a crowded city of 136,881 by 1850, and 161,429 by 1855. 13 Thus, by mid-century, new space for a residential area was in high demand, but, with the build-up of the Louisburg Square area in the 1840s, all of the peninsula's existing land had been developed. A middle-class migration to the suburbs, or even to the new South End, was impractical, due to the slow transportation of the times.14 Therefore, the Commissioners on Boston Harbor and the Back Bay reported that the "great demand for dwelling-houses in the city of Boston renders the present a favorable time to commence the filling up and sale of [Back Bay] lands. 15 A filled Back Bay, where houses could be built close to the center of Boston, would satisfy the growing need for a new residential area. design LA factor which made the filling of the Back Bay a matter of even greater urgency was the extent to which by mid-century the area had become a health menace In 1849, the Boston Board of Health demanded the filling of the area, and the extent of the problem is starkly revealed by the testimony from 1850: The Back Bay at this hour is nothing less than a great cesspool, into which is daily deposited all the filth of a large and constantly increasing population. And it is a cesspool of the worst kind, contrived, as it were, for the purpose of contamination, and not of relief; for it is an open one, and therefore exposed continually to the action of the sun and weather, and every west wind sends its pestilential exhalations across the entire city. A greenish scum, many yards wide, stretches along the shores of the basin, as far as the Western Avenue, whilst the surface of the water beyond is seen bubbling, like a cauldron, with the noxious 13. Walter H. Kilham, Boston After Bulfinch: An Account of its Architecture, 1800-1900 (Cambridge, 1946), p. 57; Walter Muir Whitehill, in Lewis Mumford and Walter Muir Whitehill, Back Bay Boston: The City as a Work of Art (Boston, 1969), pp. 86-91; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 9. 14. Mumford, Back Bay Boston, p. 23; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 362. Bunting points out that the new horsecar, which was relatively slow, did not arrive in Boston until 1853. 15. "Fourth Annual Report of the Commissioners on Boston Harbor and the Back Bay," Mass. Senate Document. No. 16, 1856, p. 2. Building Boston's Back Bay 65 gases that are exploding from the corrupting mass below. 16 Health reasons were therefore a major factor contributing to the decision to fill the Back Bay. However, the greatest incentive of all seems to have been the money-making potential in filling the Back Bay. All of the interested parties stood to gain from the conversion of useless water to saleable land. Even the Mill Corporation, which had originally dammed the bay in order to profit from its tides, now saw the greater rewards in filling in the area. Indeed, previous land fillings in the city, such as the creation of the new South End in the first half of the century, had reaped significant financial benefits. 17 Thus, the commissioners reported in 1852 that the current use of the Mill Dam was "in conflict with more important interests, public and private. #18 It was clear that few opposed the idea of filling in the Back Bay, and many supported the proposal, particularly due to the possibility for profit that the project generated. Moreover, it should be noted that Boston now possessed the capital necessary for a project of such a grand scale. Its already bustling maritime industry greatly expanded in the first half of the nineteenth century, as evidenced both by its traffic of tonnage and passengers. 19 Much of this increased capital was invested in Boston's growing railroad concerns, and it was this new industry more than any other that transformed the city into a thriving metropolis. Boston was ready to show that it was no longer a provincial New England town, and the creation of the Back Bay was intended to achieve that goal. 16. Excerpts from health reports in appendix of "Report of the Committee on the Petition of David Sears and Others in Respect to the Drainage of the Back Bay," City of Boston Document No. 14 (1850), pp. 10-12. 17. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 363; Kilham, Boston After Bulfinch, p. 62. 18. Senate Document No. 45 (1852), p. 15. 19. Mumford, Back Bay Boston, p. 18; Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 86; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 10-11. Bunting lists Suffolk County's manufacturing output at $6,500,000 in 1800. It had quadrupled by 1840, and soared another fifty percent in 1850, to a total of $45,000,000. 66 Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter, 1995 The major factor that led to the monumental and uniform character of the Back Bay as it appears today was the State's decision to consolidate its hold on the project, while working with and not against the other owners of land in the Back Bay region. Citing a colontal ordinance from 1641, the state commissioners claimed that any property "below the ordinary line of riparian ownership belongs to the state in fee. #20 This meant that any land at the low-tide mark (or one hundred rods below the high-water mark) fell under the jurisdiction of the state. As most of the Back Bay was considerably deeper than this, the state laid claim to much of the area in question. To settle disputing claims by others, the Tripartite Agreement of 1856 was worked out between the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the City of Boston, and the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation, the principal land owner. 21 Although the Commonwealth had to grant certain tracts of land to the city, and especially to the Mill Corporation, in order to insure compliance with its planning guidelines, the result would be a civic project of impressive uniformity, as private interests would have to "conform to a plan of streets required by the state commissioners. #22 At last, filling was scheduled to begin in September of 1857. Having already built on the hills that remained in Boston, the state was forced to look beyond the city limits to find fill for its Back Bay operation. With the advent of the steam shovel and the railroad, it was possible to bring earth from the sand-hills and gravel pits of Needham, nine miles to the west. 23 Twenty-five times in twenty-four hours, trains of thirty-five cars from the Charles River Railroad Company would make their way across the flats, depositing fill to a depth of twenty feet, and eventually creating 580 acres of land in a little over thirty years. The fill 20. Senate Document No. 45 (1852), p. 4; "Report of the Committee Appointed under the Resolves of 1856, chapter 76, in Relation to Lands in the Back Bay, with accompanying documents. Also, the Fifth Annual Report of the Commissioners on the Back Bay," Mass. Senate Document No. 17 (1857), cited henceforth as "Lands in Back Bay." 21. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 151; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 44 and 364; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 20. 22. "Lands in Back Bay," P. 3. 23. "Ballou's Pictorial," May 21, 1859, quoted in Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, pp. 152-154; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 365-366. Building Boston's Back Bay 67 had reached Clarendon Street by 1860, Exeter Street by 1870, and Kenmore Square by 1890. 24 The district defined as the residential Back Bay in this article had taken shape by 1880; that area bounded by the Public Garden in the east. the Charles River in the north, Olmsted's Fenway Park in the west, and the train tracks of the Boston and Albany Railroad in the south. 25 This region's final layout was shaped by the two main concerns which had inspired filling the bay in the first place - its money-making potential and its nuisance as a health hazard. Motivated by a desire to maximize financial profits, the Commonwealth adopted a plan that divided the newly-created land into as many house lots as possible. This emphasis is evident from the very beginning, when the commissioners advised that just as state lands in Maine had been sold for a profit, money could be made from Commonwealth property "now lying under water. #26 Additionally, such restrictions as the one which did not allow more than one-third of the new land to be set aside for public use, exemplified the attitude taken towards the Back Bay as a money-making matter. 27 It is also interesting to note that many of the design proposals that the Commonwealth rejected recommended keeping significant portions of the Back Bay under water, and had failed to maximize the number of lots that could be sold for a profit. 28 24. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 158; Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 366-367; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 20; Mumford, Back Bay Boston, p. 23. A set of fifteen blueprints preserved in the Boston Public Library and prepared by Fuller and Whitney, Back Bay engineers, shows the development of the Back Bay fill at ten year intervals, from 1814 to 1881. 25. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, P. 159; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 21; Mumford, Back Bay Boston, p. 19. 26. "Lands in Back Bay," p. 3. 27. "First Report of the Commissioners on Boston Harbor and the Back Bay, under Resolves of 1852, chapter 79," Mass. Senate Document No. 62 (1855). 28. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 387 and 389. Robert Gourlay's plan, which only minimally filled in the Bay for dwelling houses, is discussed in Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, pp. 146-149. For David Sears' plan, which included a 75 acre lake, see Whitehill, pp. 149-150. George Snelling's 1859 proposal, including a basin of water 700 feet wide as a substitute for Commonwealth Avenue, is described by Whitehill, p. 156. 68 Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter, 1995 In the early stages of the Back Bay development, the form of building construction - tall, narrow, and flat-faced - was a product of the central capitalizing goal described above. Back Bay lots were widened only after 1860, when the district had already been established as a fashionable neighborhood and developers knew that their land would draw high bids at the public auctions. 29 The financial rewards were indeed significant. The sale of filled lands from 1860 to 1879 alone, brought the Commonwealth a net profit of $3,442,205. Private landowners reaped tremendous benefits as well. Bainbridge Bunting's account of a lot at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Arlington Street, where the land and building values increased 665 and 243 percent respectively between 1858 and 1910, is illustrative of the great wealth enjoyed by those who invested in the new region. 30 A second factor, however, seems to have worked against this money-making goal. Because the Back Bay had become so harmful to the city's residents, the authorities wanted the new land to insure the good health of the people - both physically (with broad avenues and green spaces) and intellectually (with cultural and academic institutions). This attitude was evident in the earliest discussions of a new layout for the Back Bay. For example, in 1852, the commissioners reported that the receiving basin should be filled so "as to secure upon the premises a healthy and thrifty population and business forever to prevent this territory from becoming the abode of filth and disease. "31 This was certainly a reaction to the unsanitary conditions that had previously prevailed there. Similarly, three years later, a Back Bay commission was instructed to "enhance the value of the Commonwealth's lands as may be needful to prevent that vast level area from becoming hereafter the seat of narrow and filthy streets and of an overcrowded population. 32 This commitment to never allow the new Back Bay to return to its previous state of 29. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 93-95; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 24, in. 11. 30. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 368-370. 31. Senate Document No. 45 (1852), p. 17. 32. "Second Annual Report of the Commissioners on Boston Harbor and the Back Bay, under Resolves of 1852, chapter 79," Mass. Senate Document No. 62 (1855), pp. 23-24. Building Boston's Back Bay 69 unhealthiness produced an urban space dedicated to the well-being of the people. This conviction was so strong as to warrant significant financial sacrifices on the part of the Commonwealth. Of the lands filled in eight percent Xwhich would have given the state an additional $833,500 had they been sold as private lots) were given to public institutions, and forty-three percent were devoted to streets and parks. 33 Indeed, in 1857, after hearing the testimony of Arthur Gilman (who is credited with developing the plan that was later adopted), the commission decided to increase the width of the central avenue (now known as Commonwealth Avenue) from 120 to 200 feet, with houses set back twenty feet on each side, creating an impressive and monumental promenade. 34 To insure that private landowners complied with this plan, the state had to grant twelve acres of its property in the Full Basin to the Boston Water-Power Company, a subsidiary of the Mill Corporation. 35 This financial sacrifice was also motivated by "health" reasons, as this new thoroughfare would have in its center "three or four continuous rows of trees ample for walks and seats secure from the interference of carriages and would confer a lasting and permanent benefit upon the public by providing a broad and ornamental avenue connecting the Common and public garden in Boston with the picturesque and pleasing suburban territory. *36 Using the Back Bay development to improve the health of the city environment was ever a key objective of the rejected proposals of Gourlay, Sears, and Snelling, who stressed the salubrious effect of air that passes over open waters. 37 The Commonwealth wished to use the Back Bay project to improve the intellectual welfare of the people as well. From the beginning, money received from the sale of Back Bay lands was deposited into the Bay Lands Fund. Half was used to maintain the newly-created state property, while the other half 33. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 64 and 368; and Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," pp. 22 and 24 (fn. 9). 34. "Lands in Back Bay," p. 13. 36. Ibid., p. 15. 36. Ibid., pp. 13-14. 37. See fn. 28 above. 70 Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter, 1995 was parcelled out to the following academic institutions: fifty percent was put into the Massachusetts School Fund, twenty percent was given to Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, twelve percent was donated to Tufts College, and the remaining eighteen percent was divided equally among Williams College, Amherst College, and Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham. 38 'As a prerequisite for receiving these contributions, the state required most of these schools to provide scholarships for students. Thus, in a very direct way, the filling of the Back Bay worked to insure the health of the population's mind. This goal was fulfilled on an even larger scale by the establishment of the Back Bay as the cultural center of the city, especially though the creation of Copley Square. First, in 1861, the state granted a block of land on Berkeley Street to two institutions: the Boston Society of Natural History, which soon thereafter built a three-story museum that now houses Bonwit Teller's clothing store, and the then-recently incorporated Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which erected the Rogers Building on the remainder of the block. 39 Private interests took the state's lead, and in 1870 the Boston Water-Power Company granted a plot of land to the Museum of Fine Arts, at the corner of Dartmouth Street and St. James Avenue. This Victorian Gothic building was soon (in 1877) flanked by H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church on one side, and (in 1895) by McKim, Mead and White's Public Library on the other. This handsome public space, known first as Art Square, then Copley Square, had become the religious and intellectual center of Boston. With the additional presence of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Harvard Medical School in the area, and the migration of more than ten church congregations from downtown Boston to the Back Bay by the end of the century, the new district had done everything to physically, intellectually, and spiritually insure that it would never harm its residents' health again. 40 However, the incomplete nature of Copley Square and the abandonment of other park ideas for the area suggest that the 38. Acts and Resolves of Massachusetts, chapter 154 (1859). 39. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 169; Whitehill, Back Bay Boston, pp. 87-88. 40. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, pp. 164-169; Whitehill, Back Bay Boston, p. 87. Building Boston's Back Bay 71 money-making incentive to use as much of the new land as possible for house lots may have superseded the Commonwealth's commitment to construct a healthful environment. Indeed, a plan for the Back Bay area in 1861 shows three squares of land set aside to be green parks. None of these plots were used for this original purpose. The first, situated at the north end of Exeter Street, facing the Charles River, was to remain open to the water, but it must have been eliminated in 1870 when Exeter Street was narrowed to compensate the Commonwealth for salable land lost due to the widening of Dartmouth Street. 41 The second plot, along Berkeley Street, became a museum and school, and the third square, St. James Park, was allocated to the Museum of Fine Arts. 42 It was then only an accident that Copley Square developed into a public space. Originally slated for development like any other part of the Back Bay, it haphazardly took shape due to the presence of Huntington Avenue, which awkwardly jutted out at an angle in relation to the surrounding grid of streets. The two triangular plots of land created on either side of this wide avenue were bought by the city and left open as public spaces, in 1883 and 1885. 43 Proposals were submitted in an attempt to solve the oddity of a main street diagonally bisecting a public park, and it took until 1969 to finally "square" up the area. 44 This irresponsible planning on the part of the Commonwealth led to an urban space that was unable to realize its potential monumentality, a problem that still has repercussions today, as the weak north side of commonplace stores and office buildings fails to sufficiently pull together the four sides of Copley Square. 45 The money-making incentive seems to have overridden the desire for a healthy environment to such an extent that even the decision to appropriate land for public use may have been backed by a quest for financial gains. For example, the state 41. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 380. 42. Ibid., p. 378. 43. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, pp. 171-172; Kilham, Boston After Bulfinch, p. 62; Mumford, Back Bay Boston, p. 58. 44. Mumford, Back Bay Boston, pp. 142-145. 45. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Boston Architecture, 1637-1954 (New York, 1954), p. 17. 72 Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter, 1995 commissioners reported in 1863 that the land on Newbury Street opposite the block granted to the Museum of Natural History and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had doubled in value. 46 The Boston Water-Power Company's donation of land to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1870 may therefore have been motivated more by commercial than cultural concerns. Additionally, the plan for broad and monumental streets may just have been a ploy to maximize profits, as land values were significantly higher along Commonwealth Avenue than on the narrower streets parallel to it. 47 These conflicting factors produced a paradoxical attitude that was present from the start, as the committee appointed in 1856 reported that it is a "matter of utmost moment that a good system of streets, avenues, and public squares shall be adopted in order to make the territory as attractive as possible, and induce persons about to build houses to select lots in this locality. n48 Whether or not the profit-making goal was more of a determining factor than the quest for a healthy environment, the Back Bay's public lands were adversely affected. The significance with which planners viewed the new Back Bay is evident from the French-inspired-desig they chose for the area, and the French style of architecture that became prevalent in the district's formative years of development. The Back Bay represents a distinct break from Boston's previous civic projects which had always followed the English model. Beginning with Charles Bulfinch's Tontine Crescent on Franklin Street in 1793, and continuing with Pemberton Square in 1826, Louisburg Square in 1835, and finally the New South End in 1853. the Boston planning tradition was rooted in Georgian London. A 49 rigid gridiron plan of streets, with no clear focus, and occasional isolated parks encircled by houses, characterized these plans. The 46. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 394; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 22. 47. Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 24, fn. 11. The Eighth Annual Report of the Harbor and Land Commission (1886) states that at the private auctions conducted by the Commonwealth between 1860 and 1879, the minimum prices were fixed at $1.37 per square foot on Marlborough and Newbury Streets, and $2.25 on Commonwealth Avenue. 48. "Lands in Back Bay," p. 12. 49. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 65-67; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," pp. 23-24. Building Boston's Back Bay 73 French-inspired design for the Back Bay embodied a very different set of stylistic principles. Boston employed the Parisian model with hopes of becoming the cultural center of the United States, if not of the world. To this end, the commissioners accepted the plan that architect Arthur Gilman submitted in 1856. The proposal's broad streets, axial quality, and park-like Commonwealth Avenue were strikingly similar to the monumental Parisian boulevards constructed by Baron George Haussmann between 1853 and 1869.50 50 This type of design views streets as great outdoor corridors lined by walls of harmonious buildings, focusing the pedestrian's gaze and creating an impressive urban space (see figure one, below). 11.7 Figure One By adopting this plan, the Back Bay planners wished to elevate Boston to the level of the great cities of the world, as can be seen from the following proposal, referring to Commonwealth Avenues 50. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 15, 67-68; Bunting, "Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston," p. 24; Mumford, Back Bay Boston, p. 19; Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, p. 86. 74 Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter, 1995 It is believed that an ornamental avenue of this character, of equal length and width, with stately dwelling-houses upon each side, connecting the public parks in the center of a busy city with the attractive and quiet, although populous country in the neighborhood, is a thing not possible of construction elsewhere in the world; and those places where something of the same kind already exists, have been rendered famous in consequence. 51 This subtle yet apparent reference to Paris at the end of the commissioners' statement is indicative of the Commonwealth's desire to use the Back Bay and its French plan, to create a new Boston that would be a center of higher civilization. Figure Two It should be noted, however, that the use of a French blueprint was not a completely new phenomenon for the planners in 1856. Roots of this type of layout for the Back Bay can be traced as far back as 1824, when a proposal for development of the area depicting wide tree-lined avenues was published in a local history book. 52 Additionally, a final attempt by the city of Boston to sell the lands of the Public Garden in 1850 shows the area divided into house lots, with three new streets between Beacon and Boylston that greatly resemble Marlborough Street, 51. "Lands in Back Bay," p. 15. 52. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, pp. 142-145. Building Boston's Back Bay 75 Commonwealth Avenue, and Newbury Street. 53 Other proposals, such as that of David Sears, which was discussed earlier, include plans for an impressive central boulevard that predate Gilman's idea for Commonwealth Avenue. Thus, although a good deal of French influence is evident in the plan adopted for the Back Bay, its impact on the project was evident even before Napoleon III began his vast civic improvements. Boston's desire to reach new heights, and its hope to do so by adopting Parisian styles, is not only evident from the design of the Back Bay, but from other civic developments occurring in mid-nineteenth century Boston as well. The fact that many buildings are said to have burned in the great fire of November 9, 1872 due to the prevalence of wooden mansard roofs, indicates the extensive use of French styles in buildings at the time. 54 The first edifice in Boston to have a mansard roof was the Deacon mansion, built on Washington Street in 1848 from designs by a Paris architect. 55 A dozen years later, the most important public buildings had been embellished with French designs. The new City Hall on School Street and the Post Office building on Milk Street, both built around 1862, displayed column pavilions of superimposed orders much like those in the Tuileries and the new Louvre, in Paris. 56 Additionally, in his competition drawings for the Free City Hospital, built in the French manner in 1861, the Boston architect Gridley J. F. Bryant explained that he had chosen "the modern style of Renaissance architecture," since it "stands confessedly at the head of all the forms of modern secular architecture in the chief capitals of the world. #57 This use of the French style to transform Boston into one of the great cities of the world was certainly adopted by Arthur Gilman as well, 53. "Report of the Joint Committee on Public Lands in relation to the Public Garden, July 1850." Between Beacon and Boylaton, the plan depicts two parallel streets 100 feet wide, and one central avenue, divided into a double street, with each part fifty feet wide, with a seventy-five foot wide park down the middle, containing a fountain and trees. 54. Kilham, Boston After Bulfinch, p. 72. 55. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 79-80; Kilham, Boston After Bulfinch, p. 65. 56. Kilham, Boston After Bulfinch, pp. 65 and 68. 57. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 64. 76 Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter, 1995 mastermind of the Back Bay's plan and architect for the French designs of the new City Hall and the Boston Equitable Building, which was constructed on Milk Street in 1872 (see figure two, on page 74). 58 The artistic and cultural connections between Boston and Paris are even more evident in a number of other ways. Students of architecture frequently travelled from Boston to study in Paris, a trend begun by Henry Hobson Richardson, who entered an atelier at the Ecole des Beaux Arts after graduating from Harvard in 1860. 59 It is even more telling that Boston architect William Ware, when asked in 1865 to head the first architectural school in the United States, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, brought Eugene Letang from the Ecole des Beaux Arts to teach architectural design. 60 The significance that Boston placed upon the French style can also be seen from the fact that Ware's partner, Henry van Brunt, translated the Discourses by Viollet-le- Duc between 1863 and 1872. Additionally, French painting was collected, taught, and popularized in Boston, in part due to the presence of William Morris Hunt, who frequently visited the city after 1856 and took up permanent residence there in 1862. 61 The Back Bay was thus only one example, albeit a grand example, of the many French artistic influences that Bostonians adopted in an attempt to establish their city as one of the cultural centers of the world. The plan of the Back Bay demanded a very specific type of architecture. Although Bainbridge Bunting identifies many influences in Back Bay building - from Ruskinian Gothic to Queen Anne to the Romanesque - he shows that early buildings, from 1857 to 1869. were consistently of a French type, a design Bunting terms the "French Academic. #62 This style of architecture is characterized by several features. 63 The most obvious of these 58. Kilham, Boston After Bulfinch, p. 69. 59. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, p. 76. 60. Ibid., p. 78; Kilham, Boston After Bulfinch, p. 79. 61. Bunting, Houses of Boston's Back Bay, pp. 81-82. 62. Ibid., chapters six and seven. For the French influence, see chapter five. The later styles are discussed in chapters six and seven. 63. Ibid., pp. 87-91. Building Boston's Back Bay 77 is the mansard roof, first appearing at 122 Beacon Street in 1857. Another requirement of this style is a symmetrically organized facade. The ornamentation on this facade is distributed around areas of structural importance, such as door and window openings, on the main cornice, on levels of the various floors, and on the basement, and is therefore architectonic in nature. The main entrance is usually protected by a porch or vestibule and flanked by classical post and lintel forms, or freestanding columns. The treatment of windows was also distinctly different from the Boston tradition, as unaccented_opening flush with the facade and framed by outside shutters, gave way to windows set off from the plane of the building by Renaissance-style stonework. Indeed, the French influence on the Back Bay's early architecture can most directly be seen in the facade of 22-30 Marlborough St., built in 1863. The uniformity of arches, fenestration. and cornice height is incredibly reminiscent of contemporary work outside Paris, at the Hospice des Incurables of Ivry, designed by Theodore Labrouste between 1862 and 1865.6 64 The architectural trends in the first dozen years of Back Bay development were thus rooted in mid-nineteenth century French designs and motifs. The "French Academic" was the style most compatible with the Gilman plan for the Back Bay. By creating harmonious blocks of buildings, this architectural style places less emphasis on the individual houses, and sees them instead as mere walls of the more emphasized street-corridor. The uniformity desired for such an environment was mainly created by maintaining consecutive cornice and roof heights. A prime example is a Beacon Street block of twenty-seven houses built over a period of seven years, where the cornice line changes but four times. 65 Other ways of establishing uniformity were through the use of either an identical or integrated design for a group of consecutive buildings, building in pairs, and maintaining symmetrical facades, even in narrow lots.66 This view of the house as but one component of the greater streetscape emphasizes the manner in which the architecture of the Back Bay was greatly molded by the district's urban design. Even the buildings' interior plans, shaped by the 64. Ibid., pp. 82-85. 65. Ibid., p. 95. 66. Ibid., pp. 96-113. 78 Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter, 1995 need to conform to the narrow lots assigned by the commissioners, are products of the district's distinctive lay-out. 67 Additional uniformities were established by the plan and then incorporated into the building design. The Back Bay's ubiquitous low front steps, usually requiring no more than six risers to top the basement level, owe their short height to the fact that the cellars in the buildings could not descend too many feet below the line of the original Mill Dam without encountering significant drainage problems. 68 Similarly, the Gilman plan's uniform character was maintained through the design of sixteen- foot alleyways in the rear of the Back Bay houses. 69 By keeping service entrances behind the buildings, the side facing the street was kept free of disharmonious openings that would have disrupted the continuity of the walls lining the street-corridor. It therefore seems that the Second Empire style was the type of architecture most compatible with the urban design adopted for the Back Bay. Both artistic forms were heavily influenced by contemporary work in France, as Bostonians wished to use the Back Bay's Parisian roots as part of a greater scheme to raise their city to world-class status as a cultural center. Although the desire for financial profit may have over-matched the quest to improve the physical, cultural, and intellectual health of the city's inhabitants, the evolution of the Back Bay as a major component of the city was characterized by the farsighted planning of the Commonwealth's commissioners, eventually resulting in Frederick Law Olmsted's "emerald necklace" park system, and a residential Back Bay district that still rings true to the environment desired by Arthur Gilman almost 140 years after the adoption of his plan. 67. Ibid., pp. 130-133 and 136-139. 68. Ibid., pp. 133-134. 69. Ibid., p. 392. The Book of Boston: Chapter 16 Robest Shakleton. Page 1 of 11 Philadelphia: PennPublishing. Pp. 188-207, Web and Book design, 1920 Click Here to return to Copyright, Kellscraft Studio Book of Boston of 1999-2005 Content Page (Return to Web Text- Return to the Previous ures) Chapter (HOME) CHAPTER XVI THE BACK BAY AND THE STUDENTS' QUARTER O no Bostonian does the Back Bay mean water! The Charles, backed up by a dam to the dimensions of a bay, remains merely the Charles, and the Back Bay is the erstwhile swamp land beyond Beacon Hill and the Common. Even the Public Garden was, long ago, merely a marsh at the Common's end, and the great space beyond, now covered by endless streets and houses, is all made land. It is the Back Bay. The main artery of the Back Bay is Commonwealth Avenue, and it is SO proudly boulevarded, in noble sweep and breadth, that one is almost ready to forget the brown-stone monotony of its houses. The avenue is two hundred and twenty feet in width, from house-front to house-front, and is free of street cars. Down its center is a great, generous, tree- lined, well-shaded parkway, with a path down the middle for pedestrians; there are pleasantly placed benches by which the park-like character is increased; and this long central greenery has a series of admirably placed statues, with the equestrian Washington, excellently done by Ball, at the beginning of the line; although Bostonians themselves long ago pointed out that he has turned his back on the State House and is riding away! This avenue is SO successful, SO notable, as to have served as a model for other boulevards throughout the United States, and it has also given inspiration to Boston for her recent development of home-bordered parkways running out toward outlying suburbs. One of the statues is of John Glover of Marblehead, who commanded a thousand men of his town, whom he formed into a redoubtable Marine Regiment, "soldiers and sailors too"; and this monument perpetuates his skill and bravery in getting Washington's army across to New York after the defeat at Long Island, and his even more remarkable success in boating the army across the Delaware on a certain bitter winter's night at a place still called Washington's Crossing. He died in his beloved Marblehead; but Boston has placed his statue here, feeling that in this city such a valiant son of New England should be forever remembered. His hand firmly grasps his sword hilt - but the sword itself has gone! Was it the act of some vandal, one wonders, some one with a degenerate idea of relic hunting? But at least nobody ever took his sword away from John Glover living. Another of the line of statues is that of Alexander Hamilton, and it looks odd because it is http://www.kellscraft.com/BookofBoston/BookofBoston16.html 9/8/2005 3/16/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review Open Letters Monthly L an Arts and Literature Review Home About Contacts and Submissions Support OLM 2012 Search Home American Aristocracy, Arts & Life, belles-lettres, current events, Features, history, politics, Politics & History American Aristocracy - Harvard Pulpit: Boston Brahmin Liberalism By Douglass Shand-Tucci No Comment the (ottalgexin Ongland Boston printmaker William Burgis view of Harvard (1726) shows, not the traditional closed and cloistered court, but a three-sided court open to the public street, an early example of Harvard's architecture reflecting Boston Brahmin liberalism. "O relic and type of our ancestor's worth First flower of their wilderness! Star of their night!, / Be the herald of light / Till the stock of the Puritan's die." The current U.S. president, his likely Republican opponent, the previous president - never mind FDR, the greatest modern president, or JFK, everyone's favorite president - all have found themselves on graduation day asked to intone this hymn to Harvard - arguably the West's preeminent institution of higher learning, also the most enduring achievement of what Notre Dame historian James Turner has called "the closest thing to an American aristocracy, the Brahmin class of Boston." Which sets up a certain confusion. Do conservatives with a funny accent create liberal powerhouses? Neither Puritans nor Brahmins seem well cast here. Nor, perhaps, we ourselves. Yet it is our stock, surely, in a very real civic sense: "this society of Fellows," Harvard's faculty declared when announcing its tercentenary to the world in 1936, "founded in the year of Our Lord one thousand six hundred and thirty six, by Act of a Great and General Court of the Company of Massachusetts Bay convened in Boston" - was a brave ambition for the "city upon a hill", in the 1630s precariously perched, in historian Samuel Eliot Morison's words, "on the edge of the wilderness." How account for such a venture? "The Puritans," historian K. T. Erikson wrote, "were almost a mythical people in their own time, sure they were involved in a special cosmic drama [to] establish New England as the spiritual capital of Christendom, the headquarters of the Protestant Revolution." Americans ever since have "honor[ed] them as founders of a new civilization," he wrote in Wayward Puritans. Certainly they were global in their compass from the start, requiring well-educated leadership, and Boston, their bastion, has ever since been as much hobbled by their real world failures as inspired by that other-worldly cosmic drama which simply does not go away, as readers of Nathaniel Hawthorne or John Updike know, creating a Bostonian exceptionalism before ever there was an American version, neither of which can be http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism 1/20 3/16/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review understood today without reference to the other. Harvard President Lawrence Summers understood it, SO similar he-and so controversial-as Charles W. Eliot 100 years ago, and what it might yet mean - in some measure already has meant. It is true circumstances did not allow Summers the success in bringing Harvard into the 21st century that Eliot had with respect to the 20th century, or, for a more contemporary example, Director Malcolm Rogers has had in the same task at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the challenge and promise of Summers 2006 Commencement speech still resonates: "All over the world and in every corner of America, Harvard's prestige and wealth inspires awe Harvard is a place of great and transforming opportunity. We owe to the next generation, and to our own, every effort we can make [O]ur university is at an inflection point in its history If Harvard can find the courage to change itself, it can change the world I look forward to the time when because of Harvard"s magnetic power, Boston is to this century what Florence was to the 15th, - not the richest or the most powerful, but the city that through its contribution to human thought shone the greatest light into posterity." 2 When Harvard's founders went on to name the new institution after a Charlestown minister, John Harvard, who endowed the college in 1638, it was, according to The Chicago History of American Philanthropy, the beginning of that whole aspect of American civilization. Digby Baltzell, in his Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia catches the much wider significance of this, distinguishing between "Charity, in the Catholic and the aristocratic ethic, a spontaneous, stopgap and Christian response," which Philadelphia Quakerism was close to, and "Philanthropy, an infinitely Puritan and rational response to social conditions." He adds: "In contrast to charity, the systematic philanthropy of the Puritans lacked sentimentality; it translated society, inadvertently bringing power and authority to the participants in the emerging world of careers open to talent." Here the theme becomes profoundly American. As 17th-century Puritan become 18th-century Patriot became 19th-century Brahmin, the conviction that fueled this philanthropy waxed rather than waned. A landmark was the creation of the first modern foundation, the Peabody Educational Trust in 1867, by the widely acknowledged father of modern philanthropy, financier George Peabody. His first grants of the 1850s were to his hometown on Boston's North Shore, which changed its name to Peabody, and two of his benefactions were to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem and the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Peabody's gifts, however, extended to Baltimore and London, scenes of his success. Another example is John D Rockefeller, who in 1893 began the disbursement of the largest estate in American history, "entranced" according to Ron Chernow, his biographer, with the 19th century Boston merchant, Amos Lawrence. Wrote William Moran, in his The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills: "Lawrence gave away most of his money to educational and charitable organizations." Rockefeller called Lawrence's memoirs "a great inspiration to me," impressed when he read how "Lawrence gave away crisp bills. Crisp bills! I see and hear them," Rockefeller said in 1917. 'I made up my mind that, if I could manage it, some day I would give away crisp bills too." If Harvard's founding makes clear the global compass of the Puritans, while also marking the beginning of American philanthropy, another Puritan principle was autonomy, which accounts for the fact that although Harvard was founded in Boston, the new college was ordered to be built in an independent township on the capital's periphery named after the English Cambridge. Disclosing what Max Savelle has called the "basic principle of congregational autonomy" beloved of the Puritans, "this Congregationalism became the basis, indeed, of [Puritan] civic and political institutions, and many historians have pointed to the significance of this in fueling the American Revolution, child as it was SO often of the New England Town Meeting." That impact, however epochal, does not exhaust the significance of this principle of autonomy in American history, prompting one of 20th century Harvard's leading scholars to an insight few have: "From the founding of Cambridge in 1630 to the establishment of industrial parks along Route 128 in our own day," John Coolidge wrote in his introduction to Old Cambridge, "Boston has created these out of town communities as specialized complements to the central city." The result of this Puritan view was that by the Civil War era Cambridge had become what Henry James called Boston's "academic suburb," by the 20th century the focal point of "Academic Boston," or as the still independent municipality of Cambridge likes to call itself today in its tourist brochures, "Boston's Left Bank." By the mid 19th century there was not only "Academic Boston" in Cambridge, but "Horticultural Boston" (as well as "a tax haven for affluent Bostonians" in historian David Hacket Fischer's words) in Brookline. Then too there was "Industrial Boston," developed by the Boston Associates, first in Waltham, later in Lowell. http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 2/20 3/16/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism I Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review As l'have written in "Brooklyn/Brookline" (2010), following Coolidge's lead as I see it, this pattern was widely emulated in the 19th-century in the expanding United States. With the exception of a brief period in the 1870s, Bostonians built their metropolis in a very distinct way. As opposed to what urbanologist Kenneth Johnson in his Crabgrass Frontier calls "municipal imperialism" - New York in 1898 actually annexed the 4th largest city in the country, as Brooklyn then was - in Boston what fellow urbanologist James Carroll has called "municipal fragmentation" was the rule. The rejection by the "Bostonians of Brookline," as I insist on calling them, of their town's proposed annexation to the core city, famously established Brookline as famously the first American suburb. It became Boston's pattern, the pattern of "all the Boston towns" - in landscape architect Charles Eliot's eloquent phrase - and to the dismay of city planners everywhere it became the American way. Three Puritan become American themes - globality, philanthropy, autonomy. But the crux of the matter, the controlling factor in Harvard's founding, was otherwise. 3 We do not at once see this fourth factor, however controlling. One reason is that it does not figure as prominently as it should in my view in the explications of the Brahmin value system - of which more soon here when we come to Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr's classic definition of Boston's Brahmins - or, indeed, in the "state of mind" we accept as characteristically Bostonian, always excepting the writings of Perry Miller and Van Wyck Brooks and F.O. Matthiessen. Most scholars who have worked in this field have discounted this fourth factor. Frederick Cople Jaher, for instance, does this in his otherwise excellent The Urban Establishment, where he deals with learning and culture in the Puritan/Patriot/Brahmin continuum only after a far more extensive discussion of Brahmin economics and politics. Similarly, sociologist Betty Farrell, in her Elite Families of 1993, and Thomas Adam, rather more negatively in 2009's Buying Respectability. Boston Brahmins, he asserts, were "an economic, political, social and philanthropic elite." Similarly, and more in our context here, Ronald Story, in his Harvard and the Boston Upper Classes, though he admits "what distinguishes 'Proper Boston' of pre-Civil War days from its New York or Philadelphia counterparts was precisely its singular cultural sheen its ethic of stewardship," insists that in the post-Civil War era as "the Boston elite's consciousness of itself [came to reflect] what the world would perceive as a Brahmin aristocracy," the reality was more and more that "culture itself and the institutions which embody and support it are products of economic forces." I disagree. Learning and culture - the life of the mind - comes first in the Puritan/Patriot/Brahmin value system, not economics, nor politics either for that matter. No one would deny someone has to pay the bills, though it is worth pointing out the first Boston aristocrat to influence global economics, Francis Cabot Lowell, did much more than that. Nor do I deny that later Brahmins like William Hathaway Forbes, the key figure of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and the railroad magnet Charles Francis Adams, or James Jackson Storrow, who led the early automobile industry through his financing of General Motors, payed their share of those bills, again with interest. Yet the need for economic ballast in any great urban center of civilization notwithstanding, in all three of Boston's first three centuries - Puritan, Patriot, Brahmin - above all in the case of Harvard's founding - the energizing, controlling force that stands out, as it does not, for example, in Philadelphia or New York, is the Puritan devotion to learning. In this Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard's historian, concurs. Remember the speaking aristocracy and the listening democracy? A very high percentage of the original settlers of Boston were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, and as Morison emphasized, their leadership was from the first "accepted by the community, not imposed on it, say I; for men of education were the chosen leaders of the Puritan migration." It was as much a pattern, and, say I, a more important one, as globality, philanthropy or autonomy. A reason Americans tend to downplay this passion for learning - and to accept economics as always the driving force - is, I suspect, not just that it is, SO to speak, the American way to devalue the intellectual side of life, but because of the link in the case of Puritan learning to their SO very unattractive (to moderns) religion, the religion of the book, after all. Fair enough. But the way the early devotion to the life of the mind on the part of Bostonians was linked to religion was different than we imagine, the entirely secular aspect of which is supplied by Diarmaid MacCulloch in his Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. In that work, the Oxford historian dwells on an astounding fact of his wide-ranging study of three millennia - that Puritan Boston from the beginning - however precariously situated on the Atlantic rim - was "possibly the most literate society in the world." That is surely the outstanding characteristic of Boston from the beginning, an inheritance Americans can all claim without taint of Puritan religious intolerance. The implication of this were considerable. The United States would create over time three of its four national (as opposed to regional) capitals - its political capital, Washington; its economic capital, New York, and eventually its entertainment capital, Los Angeles - each in the developing nation-state's own image. Boston, however, the fourth of the national http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism 3/20 3/16/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism I Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review capitals, the intellectual capital, Americans inherited. Boston Latin is forever America's first school, Harvard its first academy of higher learning, like SO many Colonial establishments models for the institutions of a new American nation- state SO importantly created in the image of the Boston city-state that in large measure birthed it. And however much they would privilege the political, economic and entertainment capitals over the intellectual capital, Americans early formed the habit of checking in, SO to speak, periodically, with the New England capital, which may be said to have come to function as something of a spiritual capital given its historical role as - in British journalist Chris Wright's blunt words - "the founding city of the most powerful nation on earth," for something like an ongoing national vision. Not, it must be admitted, always to good purpose! But once or twice to very good purpose indeed; perhaps most successfully at the crisis point of the Civil War, provoking as it did something of a second founding of the Republic. To misunderstand all this is to make constructing a new history almost impossible. Not just Boston studies, but American history, is endlessly distorted, for example, by the way Boston's cultural renaissance of the 1870s, 80s and 90s - SO important to post bellum America - the era of modern Harvard's beginnings, of MIT's, of the new Museum of Fine Arts, the Copley Square library and the Boston Symphony, all generators of much new thought and learning from the work of William James to Alexander Graham Bell - is too often depicted as a consolation prize for Brahmin decline then in political power within the city and for Boston's overall decline in economic power nationally, with no thought given to the fact that Brahmin values had always privileged learning and intellectual life and culture above economics and politics, none of which had risen, for example, to the sort of reward a Charles Francis Adams, for example, had sought. Thus when the first of the extraordinary cast of Bostonians, Edward Morse, projected for "Boston by far the greatest collection of Japanese art in the world" for its new art museum, it represented more a reassertion of traditional Boston Brahmin priorities than some sort of fallback position for loosing control, for example, of the mayor's office. No more was the Boston Public Library in Copley Square a consolation prize. Remember British critic Matthew Arnold's astonishment at encountering the barefoot news boy, the most astounding thing he'd ever seen he said. Boston's library was an epochal institution, and its apotheosis in Copley Square was a breakthrough in western history: the world's first tax- supported big city circulating library free and open to all. (There had been "public" libraries in Europe even in ancient times, but they were never open to all classes - barefoot newsboys, for instance - and even for those classes who were welcome, none were circulating or lending libraries; rather, scrolls could only be read on the premises. The tax-supported circulating public library open to all, like its sister, the modern public art museum, is an Anglo-American creation of the 19th-century.) Hardly less important was the new thought and breakthroughs in several fields that occurred in Copley Squares institutions - the pioneering work of the father of brain surgery, for example, Harvey Cushing, at Harvard Medical School next to the Public Library - and the often seminal Lowell Lectures of the Lowell Institute in the square, under the auspices of which William James lectured free to all on his latest work on mental states and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr on the Common Law, the origin of his famous book on the subject. Similarly the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It is true that business was no small thing to the Boston Brahmin. Nathan Appleton could say in 1828 that he knew of "no purer morality in any department of life than that of the counting house," evidence that "throughout the 19th century Boston's commercial and intellectual communities lived together in easy http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 4/20 3/16/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism I Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review harmony." But it is also true that "Boston's romance between mind and Mammon was not to last," Russell Adams wrote in The Boston Money Tree, where he quotes [Brahmin financier] "Henry Lee Higginson [as] see[ing] Boston's attitudes toward the time-honored pursuit of wealth, no matter how creditably conducted, change from approbation to scorn" in the post Civil War years of the robber barons. Indeed, qualms about a too great emphasis on money-getting surfaced noticeably -according to Paul Goodman in his Ethics and Enterprize: The Values of a Boston Elite - when Boston was at its economic height, a generation or two before the city's late 19th-century business decline. "During the first half of the 19th century, as a group of Boston businessmen were transforming their region's economy, they were also elaborating a value system, Goodman writes: "Rejecting the single-minded pursuit of wealth, Bostonians claimed to prefer the balanced personality that tempered the quest for wealth with standards of gentlemanly decorum and the purifying influences of culture and stewardship, all in the conviction that "by pursuing culture, the businessman might broaden his sympathies, refine his sensibilities, and escape the moral dangers of a consuming thirst for gain.' Moreover, Goodman adds, "within Brahmin society sons of merchants turned their back on the life of trade, [r]evolted by a growing commercialization." Dickens saw this, writing of Boston that there: "The almighty dollar sinks into something comparatively insignificant amidst a whole Pantheon of better gods." The change from approval to scorn, furthermore, registered in the parents generation too. Henry Lee Higginson was among the most scornful, finally judging "material success as a corrupter of his generation. In 1878, at the peak of his business career, he lamented" according to Russell Adams, "to his literary cousin, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: 'I have become a money-getter." But what Thomas did for literature (Emily Dickinson), Henry would do for music! Ten years later Henry Lee Higginson founded the Boston Symphony - and even the New York musicologist Joseph Horowitz in Classical Music in America, who entirely misunderstands most things Brahmin, credits that legacy SO highly he calls Higginson "a colossus, an American hero." Suddenly we are searching again for the capitol of the world! And of the literate world in the 1630s - at least in the Atlantic world - that would be Boston! Recall Richard Hofstadter's declaration that "the Puritan founders had their terrible faults, but the Puritan clergy came as close to being an intellectual ruling class. as America has ever had." More than half the tax levy of the entire colony at its most fragile stage was allocated to support Harvard. There is a sure sign of Puritan values, and an economic one too! And it was as sure a sign of Brahmin values in the 19th century when British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in the mid 20th century pronounced at the end of the Brahmin era on what would be seen as its chief legacy, that "insofar as the world of learning posses a capital city, Boston with its neighboring institutions, approximates the position that Paris held in the Middle Ages." Now no one should argue that the circumstances of the 1630s compelled those of the 1940s; only that the circumstances of the 1940s had very deep roots, long cultivated. How long is startlingly obvious when one considers the temple - the stately vestibule of the city's storied public library in Copley Square - 20th century Boston decided upon for the statue of the governor, Sir Henry Vane the younger - who presided over that "Great and General court houlden at Boston on October 28 1636 that passed the legislation" in Morison's words, "that founded Harvard." Such a temple is no surprise. More SO the fact that its chief votary in the 1930s was John Brooks Wheelwright, one of America's foremost Modernist poets-and a Marxist-illustrating the sort of continuities Bostonians find SO fructifying. The chief continuity, furthermore - easy to miss because it becomes as it evolves two-fold - is that the passion for leaning of the first Puritan generation was compounded within two generations, still in the 17th-century, by an increasing passion too for liberal learning. 4. "Most beautiful, most Tuscan, most useless Public Building in America" - Wheelwright's brusque, disillusioned opening line in the "Banned in Boston" period of his of 1940 poem - "Boston Public Library," says it all. Twelve generations of Wheelwrights preceded the poet at Harvard, spanning the three centuries we have just leaped. Furthermore, when Wheelwright XII, himself the son of one of Bostons leading architects, became the sort of activist at Harvard who could SO chastise Boston's library, he was in his view emulating Wheelwright I, a Puritan ministerial ally of Vane three hundred years previously. Both the Puritan governor and the Marxist poet haunt the BPL's vestibule-temple still, Vane most obviously, who as Erikson points out espoused "a brand of Puritanism [that was] slowly bringing them to the notion that states might tolerate a diversity of religious opinion." Vane's huge popularity in the capitol - he was called "the champion of Boston" - derived from the fact that he possessed what Erikson called "a quick, easy sympathy with the more advanced ideas of the day." No wonder the 20th century poet identified with Vane, especially through the ideas of Anne Hutchinson's Antinomian Rebellion, a bid for religious freedom the specifics of which are obscure today but were a dominant aspect of http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 5/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism I Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review the decade in which Harvard was born, ideas ultimately enshrined in the US Constitution. Sufficient for us today is to refer to the judgment of Charles and Mary Beard in their Rise of American Civilization. In this world view, Wheelwright's too, "the Antinomian controversy of the 1630s, the abolitionist movement led by [William Lloyd] Garrison and [Wendell] Phillips and the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau have to be assessed as expressive of leftward moving and more militantly democratic forces within the bourgeois revolutionary movements," each of which "wave of revolution," according to Wheelwright biographer Alan Wald, was led by men and women who "came from the upper strata of society." The last sentence is key, and therein lies the most important parallel between Vane, my Puritan choice for proto-Boston Brahmin, and Wheelwright, very much by the 1930s a Brahmin relic. Indeed, what stands out historically about the governor is also what stands out about the poet. A longer glance at Macmonnies' statue of Vane at the BPL makes the point. Was there ever more elegant, more confident a cavalier than this booted, spurred and plumed figure putting on his riding gloves? A convinced Puritan - Vane would ultimately be beheaded by the royalists - he nonetheless never tried to hide where he came from, that he was an aristocrat. In the 1930s it was not plumes but a raccoon coat that conveyed Wheelwright similar stand. Indeed, when he was once pulled out of a Depression bread line where he was proselytizing by a policeman who noticed how well dressed he was, he protested "I am a poet." Thus one sees in both the Puritan and the Marxist, a stubborn refusal to change in small things allied to an equal openness to complete change in larger things. It would become characteristic of the Puritan-Patriot-Brahmin continuum, highlighting the trajectory of Boston historically as an intellectual center. Although on the all important surface, custom reigned, the overtones, SO to speak, disclosed not a narrowing, but a broadening of attitude; not a more and more rigid conservatism, but a more wide-ranging liberalism. Indeed, by as early as in the 1690s Bostonians counted among their leadership a growing number of liberal Puritans. Nor is there any secret how this came about really. This liberalism first appeared in England, Samuel Eliot Morison pointed out, and it was Morison who elsewhere explained the differences between Harvard and Yale's development, "New Haven was a small place, Connecticut a rural colony at a time when Massachusetts was a royal province with a miniature vice-regal court, and Boston a trading metropolis that ape[d] the manners and reflected the whims of England," in fact an Atlanticist port capital. Evidence of this 17th century liberalism abounds in both the arts and the sciences. Boston's reception of the Copernican revolution, for example. Edward J. Pfieffer, the historian of science, in Thomas Glick's The Comparative Reception of Darwinism in America, casts his mind back to an earlier century and recounts "American acceptance of new scientific thought - for example, Galileo's at 17th century Harvard," an acceptance Pfeifer writes that has "been taken by historians as the mark of a sophisticated but still colonial culture." As telling was 17th-century Harvard's choices in art. What Harvard inherited from the English collegiate scene architecturally was the typology of the cloister - serene, harmonious, but also insular, introverted, discouraging contact with the world. However, when a new architectural form emerged in the English Cambridge - the open three-sided court, seen at Gonville and Caius College and then at Emmanuel, John Harvard's college, only 45 years before Harvard was founded in far away Boston - Harvard was quick to take it up. Interestingly, in Bainbridge Bunting's and Margaret Henderson Floyd's architectural history of Harvard, they refer to the same John Coolidge who SO unusually well understood deliberately Balkanized Boston to explain why Harvard was in this respect SO innovative. It was another aspect http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 6/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review of liberalism. Coolidge's conclusion was that it was a desire for "interaction with the city." That dovetails with Bernard Bailyn's observation in Three Glimpses of Harvard History that Harvard "was an artifact of the community as a whole." Significantly, there was a daily stage by 1795 over what has now become the Red Line subway route from Beacon Hill to Harvard Square, and Bunting writes of the omnibus that replaced it by "1862 [as] apparently the first high-frequency transit route in America, and one that developed two years after the appearance of the omnibus in Paris, three years before those in London." One may be sure that frequent passengers of this service included William Brattle and John Leaverett, 1680 Harvard classmates and sole resident Harvard tutors and fellows in the late 1680s and 1690s, both liberal in thought, and Williams' elder brother Thomas Brattle, a mathematician whose work won Sir Isaac Newton's praise in his Principia. Historian Rick Kennedy in the American National Biography testifies to the importance of "the example of [Brattle] gave to his students of an orthodox Puritan committed to the ideals of the founders of New England, but open to the beginnings of the Enlightenment." Kennedy also focuses on the same learned Harvard trio in connection with the State Street area leading to Boston Harbor. Max Savelle details the matter: "it was Thomas Brattle and his brother William who together with John Leavertt, later president of Harvard, organized the liberal Puritan dissidents in Boston by the creation of the Battle St. Church in 1699 The organization of the Brattle indeed, marked the beginning of the liberalization of Puritan doctrine." Furthermore, writes Kennedy: "No better expression exists of the moderate Puritanism to which Brattle and many other Bostonians subscribed, than the Brattle Street meeting house of 1699, whose Wren-like tower and steeple were the first constructed in America." Eight years later the Liberals gained a majority on the Harvard Corporation and elected John Leavrett president. Of course liberal does always equate with patriot. But to peruse the membership lists of the Brattle Church is to discover therein Abigail and John Adams and John Hancock, patriots all on the verge of becoming Brahmins, and nimble enough Brahmins that the Torys had hardly fled to England before the triumphant patriots were seen to be moving into their Boston mansions. Like the new Napoleonic nobility whose riposte to the old Bourbon one was that they were their own ancestors, thank you, Boston's now sole and unrivaled patriot aristocrats were a case of what one can only, again, call "liberal conservatism." Consider John Adams, conservative enough to favor not only aristocracy but monarchy. Though he believed that all were created equal, Adams saw that as "a statement of personal rights" according to Richard Brookhiser, "not that all are approximately or potentially equal in condition and therefore equal in their political rights." Asserting that "people have advantages at birth or in their character," he insisted that "some men are created aristocrats." Although he and Jefferson agreed that the citizen should always decide the matter by his vote, Adams argued for what he called the five pillars of aristocracy. They were beauty, wealth, birth, genius and virtues. He argued too that any of the first three can at any time overbear the both of the last two," and as Brookheiser points out drolly, "Adams knew whereof he spoke. He possessed himself only the last two, and had many times been defeated by the first three, thus foreseeing Roosevelt's and Bushes and Kennedys and Clintons and Gores alike." "As long as there are elections," Adams opined, "people will vote for candidates they recognize. It is the tribute democracy pays to aristocracy." Yet this patriarch of Boston's leading Brahmin dynasty was also the author after the Revolution of the new Massachusetts' constitution, a most radical document indeed, SO radical Peter Kadzis, editor of Boston's leftist alternative newspaper, The Boston Phoenix, could recently write of Massachusetts that it was "arguably the world's freest political entity its [constitution's] Declaration of Rights [being] far more ambitious and inclusive than the national Bill of Rights." As we saw last time here, 200 years later Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall judged it inclusive enough to mandate same- sex marriage. It remains the oldest written constitution in the world still in use. 5. It would be too much to call the Massachusetts Constitution a Brahmin constitution, or even a Unitarian constitution, I suppose, but Adams was certainly both, and Jefferson the first, he of the "Jefferson Bible," out of which Jefferson had razored out all miracles! In post-revolutionary Boston there was no need for such discretion, and the equivalent of Jefferson's very private Bible were the very public services of King's Chapel, from the old Anglican liturgy of which all Trinitarian references were removed by America's first Unitarian Church, itself become the flagship of what historian M. A. Wolfe Howe called "the Boston religion," consolidated in Boston in 1825 with the founding of the American Unitarian Association after the new philosophy had established its dominance at Harvard Divinity School. Led by a saintly Christian humanist, William Ellery Channing, Unitarianism's thrust was that "to understand God we http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 7/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism I Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review begin," in Channing's words, "by looking inside ourselves." Which was surely to more than live up to Matei Calinescu's sharpest definition of the avant-garde: "to overthrow all the binding, formal traditions and to explore completely new horizons," the last state of which would prove to be in Puritan terms surely a completely de-Christianized denomination the least reason Brahmins and immigrants often talked past each other. As political scientist John F Stack points out in International Conflict in an American City, "the dominance of Unitarianism among the Brahmins frequently made them appear anti-Christian to many Irish and Italian Catholics." As religion in some sense waned, learning waxed. What Diarmaid McCullough observed of the 17th century Baltzell observed of de Tocqueville in the 18th, when he reported that the Bay Colony must contain the highest proportion of educated men the world had ever seen." Even more than his beloved Paris. There is the underpinning of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s classic definition of the Brahmin caste. Holmes is a hugely misunderstood and undervalued figure today, more often judged by his poetry than his prose, and as entirely a literary and not at all a medical figure. Charles Bryan, a medical school professor at the University of South Carolina, can help us here. He sees, as does William Dowling in his recent study of Holmes' years in Paris, that far from being a being a provincial, Holmes was a cosmopolitan, one reason he ended up Dean of Harvard Medical School. Writes Byran: "Holmes had a hand in every great medical advance of the 19th century; in aseptic practices and articulation of germ theory in the introduction of anesthesia (it was Holmes who proposed the term) and in the anticipation of clinical psychology and psychiatry. (def) Indeed, it is quite a joke on more than one scholar that Holmes' classic definition of the term "Boston Brahmin" comes about in the course of his "arous[al of public interest in the then unnamed fields of psychiatry and psychology" - I am quoting Byran - "through his three novels, [the first of which, The Professor's Tale, later named Elsie Venner] was where the subject came up" That is the milieu in which the Boston Brahmin was first named. I think at once of a friend who insisted to me that the Boston Brahmin must be understood as not just a "custodian of taste, but an agent of thought." The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which began in 1831-32 in New England Magazine and was revived in 1857-58 in the Atlantic, shows Holmes' growing interest in the American class system. "We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country a de facto upper stratum," Holmes concluded in Autocrat, and "of course, money is its cornerstone," what Holmes biographer Peter Gibran means when he alerts us that "the first development of the Brahmin theme comes near the end of Autocrat." Note it is a monied aristocracy that comes up first. It is not for another year, untill 1859, that a learned aristocracy arises significantly in The Professor's Story. About the first aristocracy, "merely the richer part of the community," Holmes writes that "some of these great folks are well-bred, some of them are only purse-proud and assuming," but, he continues, "the millionocracy" - note the sarcasm - "is not at all an affair of persons or families, but a perpetual fact of money with a variable human element this trivial and fugitive fact of personal wealth does not create a permanent class." But he takes quite a different view of the learned one. An "aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence," Holmes pronounces it "a caste, not in any odious sense, by the repetition of the same influence generation after generation." Contends Holmes: "a scholar is in the large proportion of cases the son of scholars or scholarly persons He comes of the Brahmin caste. Qur scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our best fruits come from well chosen grafts"; thus the learned aristocracy is hereditary. Always, he differentiates between the two aristocracies absolutely, even though he admits that "the New England Brahmin caste often gets blended with connections of political influence or commercial distinction," and that it is "a charming thing for the scholar when his fortune carries him in this way into some of the 'old families' who have fine old houses and [access to] dividend-paying companies." ("His narrow study expands into a stately library"). Indeed, Holmes took up the subject again in "Bread and Newspaper," writing "our poor Brahmins - whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles (the same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes his supposed antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the 'bloated aristocracy. 'Brahmins' only birthright," Holmes stubbornly wrote, "is an appetite for learning." http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 8/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism I Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review Holmes was not for long the only definer of 'Brahmin,' and two influential historians seem not to have. Story points out that John Lothrop Motley in his Memorial to Josiah Quincy (1864) defined Brahmin as "rich, well-born and virtous," and Stephen Kandler shows in his "Francis Parkman's Ethnography of the Brahmin Caste " that Parkman undertook a very racist comparison of the term with reference to the American Indian. Moreover, most scholars also take Story's view that "the employment of this term before the mid [19th]-century is an anachronism, for it did not enter the lexicon until the time of the Civil War," having gradually "displac[ed] the terms 'Federalist (or Whig) aristocracy" and "Boston Associates" (How quickly is hard to say; the New York Times, where the term "Boston Brahmin" appeared first in 1874 - three years ahead of the Boston Globe - published a rave review of Elsie Venner without once mentioning the author's coining of the term.) But whether the caste being newly named changed is a nice point. May we properly call Saint Peter a Christian, or Michelangelo gay? Even Story writes of what he calls, somewhat awkwardly, a "finished Brahminism at a particular if not quite definable point in the 1860s." Not at all definable in my view. Consider Peter Dorkin Hall's perspective. "In order to understand the context in which privately endowed American cultural institutions developed," he insists, one must focus on a group - "called the 'Boston Brahmins' after the 1850s descendants of about a hundred individuals living in the 18th century," particularly Amorys, Lawrences, Lees, Lowells and Peabodys. The senior aristocracy's history in Boston is seamless, whatever one calls it. Which, by the way, finally, was more important, Holmes's view aside? It is no surprise that Baltzell pronounced that "Massachusetts was dominated by an educated rather than a propertied upper class." But Emerson biographer Lawrence Buell leaves little doubt either of which aristocracy he thought more formative: The Boston into which [in 1803] Emerson was born was proud of its revolutionary heritage, but a cultural backwater compared to London and Paris Yet within a mere half century New England - and the Boston area in particular - had become a center for literature, for avant garde American thought in religion, philosophy and education, and for a host of reform movements from temperance to abolition to feminism. The reason? One, perhaps te most important, was the man Buell pronounces "one of the great literary essayists of all time and one of the most influential figures in the history of American thought. 6. Two years before Holmes coined the term "New England Brahmin" in the Atlantic to describe the Boston city-state's senior aristocracy, another leading figure of the day used the same word in the same magazine in 1858, and quite pointedly claimed to be a "Brahmin" himself in what Robert Richardson calls "one of [Emerson's] last great poems." "If the red slayer thinks he slays, / Or if the slain think he is slain? They know not well the subtle ways? I keep, and pass, and turn again./ They reckon ill who leave me out; / when me they fly, / I am the wings; / I am the doubter and the doubt, / And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." Deeper down that urges us, and no surprise, for the Boston Brahmin was always more engaged with Asian thought than most realize. As an indication of how profound and intimate was this engagement I like to cite the funeral of William Stugris Bigelow at Trinity Church, a funeral in the Anglican rite, presided over by Episcopal bishop, but where the body was clothed in the vestments of a Buddhist priest, which Bigelow was. Yet who reads the Buddha's pronouncement - "he who is noble, heroic, a great sage, passionless, pure and enlightened, him call a Brahman" - and then reads Emerson's "Brahma" and does not see how each reflects the other will not understand why critic Pico Iyer could tell Christopher Lydon recently on Open Source that "the higher form of globalism, I've always thought, is Emerson. That's why I chose to write a book about the dalai lama." Pico calls that religious leader the "best sort of New England Transcendentalist" and Emerson's globalism "not at the level of Microsoft, McDonalds, or Britney Spears, but at the level of conscience, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 9/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism I Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review imagination and the heart." If that is the deepest reason Holmes reached into India to name Boston's learned caste, Emerson, it is well to recall, lest he be mistaken for an exotic, was also the American Plato; "the angel with whom we must struggle," critic Harold Bloom has written, "if we are to win the blessing of a new name, whether it be the American scholar or some 21st century equivalent." Which is to pose a nice question: When a present-day scholar, Dr. Robert Gordon, in Mandala of Indic Traditions, urges the author of "Brahma" as "the first Boston Brahmin," I am reminded of Protap Chunder Mozoomdar's pronouncement over a century ago now in "Emerson as Seen from India," that Boston's iconic thinker "had all the wisdom and spirituality of the Brahmans [of India] And in that sense Emerson was the best of the Brahman's." Best in India? First in Boston? Accolades worth repeating because unique, but I suspect both, though I can really speak only to the second. I will leave it to Dr. Rajat Chandra to say that the great Indian luminary "[Rabindranath Tagore's] Brahmo faith had Unitarian influences," and that the "writings of Ralph W. Emerson, the famed Boston Brahmin who had great regard for Indian culture, inspired many educated Bengalis." Certainly there is on the Boston side near contemporary documentation of this. In 1908, in an article entitled "Young Hindus in Boston," The Boston Globe reported of a group of University of Calcutta graduates visiting the New England capital that they "belong[ed] to the Brahmo Sanaj reigion, a comparatively new sect, referred to by them as similar to Unitarianism here". As to the Boston accolade, Emerson's father, the Reverend William Emerson was as much a Brahmin as his son. On the other hand, it may truly be said of Ralph Waldo Emerson, scholar-son of a scholar father, neither ever well off, that no one ever better fulfilled Holmes's definition of the Brahmin. Emerson's place in the development of the Unitarian movement can be seen by consulting a work like Sam Storm's Modern Theological Liberalism, where(Storm divides Unitarian history into three periods: The introductory one dominated by the establishment of King's Chapel, the consolidating period dominated by William Ellery Channing, and the mature period, wherein Emerson inspired a "flowering" of the movement - Transcendentalism. What all shared was a conspicuous and increasing liberalism and elitism: as the old saw has it-the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston.) Historians of religion who have addressed the matter are clear about the nature of Unitarianism. "Archetypal modern intellectuals," Daniel Walker called them, "celebrat[ing] the characteristic features of modernism capitalism, theism, liberalism and optimism." Kavel van Baalens agreed. In his The Chaos of Cults, he called Unitarians the "Modernists of Protestantism." In The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, William R Hutchinson declares that "in opening religion to. scientific method and in alleviating the astounding American provincialism about world religions, the 19th century Unitarians made incalculable contributions [as] pioneers of a modern synthesis." In this connection, "scholars now argue," Frank Schulman writes, "that Emerson did not reject his Unitarianism, but transformed it through Transcendentalism," creating what has been called an American Renaissance. Yet as he became more and more American, Emerson hardly became less Bostonian. It is true, as Lawrence Buell points out, that "most Boston businessmen found Emerson's ideas both disconcerting and contemptible," and that Emerson returned the favor - disdaining "the greed and philistinism of State Street" Henry Adams was the rare intellectual who agreed with State Street, if for different reasons - but the sage of Concord insisted on Boston as Vasari of Florence, whether of its core city, which he insisted must lead American civilization and where he lectured and published and haunted bookshops and joined clubs, or the suburb of his constant retreat; and who could mistake Concord for the suburb of an other capital? Concord joined Cambridge, Brookline, Lowell and SO on as another of the "specialized complements" Boston created around itself - this time "Philosophical Boston". Emerson, of course, is a classic example of the Boston-centric global orientation, for his essays and orations - think especially of his "American Scholar," the so-called "American intellectual Declaration of Independence" - made him an international figure. Still do. Not just in obvious ways, such as President Obama binding Emerson's essay on Self Reliance into the publication of his Inaugural Address, but in the way Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell constantly engages Emerson and Thoreau in the company of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, pointing especially to how Emerson in Cavell's world view, describes - even to Nietzsche, of all people, who borrowed much from Emerson - to each reader everywhere "his own idea never final, always initial, always on the way." Adds Goodman: In Emerson's way of seeing, "one finds God only in the present; God is, not was." One is reminded that Emerson charged that "historic Christianity" proceeds "as if God were dead." Emerson on God, Cavell on Emerson, Goodman on Cavell's Emerson - it is in the last category perhaps one does well to seek the role in Emerson's thought of Indian philosophy. Though one can too much urge the importance of this - "Emerson," Goodman writes," was a philosophical original and he transformed everything he touched." Yet his "Over- Soul" is one of his "quintessentially Hindu writings," and his "Indian associations shape the images and doctrines of his http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism 10/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review greatest essay, Experience." The depth of the Boston elite's relationship with India particularly needs to be remembered. It was symbolized not only by the huge bulk of India Wharf, four stories of counting rooms and stores and warehouses extending hundreds of yards into Boston Harbor, but by the intensity of interest of Charles Eliot Norton, for instance, an uber-Brahmin of national repute eventually, Of Norton and India historian James Turner writes that India interested Norton because, like Alexis de Toequeville seeking France's future in the American present, Norton always pondered foreign cultures with an eye to elucidating his own. Parsees prowling the pages of the North American Review became a case study in the national interweaving of religion, literature and the arts and individual moral formation. [Parsee] religion exemplified the historicist principles by which Unitarians explained religious development, in this case the corruption of belief into superstition." Unitarians in turn had many important connections with liberal Indian thinkers. Emerson came by his interest in things Indian chiefly through his father, William Emerson, the founder in 1804 of the Anthology Club and the editor of the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, which regularly carried articles on Indian philosophy, a subject young Emerson also pursued at Harvard. So it does not perhaps surprise that the Transcendentalists in the 1830s were "the first group in America, however loosely knit, to pay serious attention," in Leyla Goren's words, "to Indian thought." It is Goren who most closely links through Indian philosophy the Puritan ethos with the Emersonian ethos, asserting I think persuasively that Emerson and his colleagues were drawn to Indian thought because "it was profound without being gloomy. The Puritans harsh insistence on the pre-eminent importance of Salvation was suited to the exigencies of reform, or of revolution, or of migration and settlement," Goren suggests, "but was simply not sufficient to appeal to the spiritual hunger of Emerson," the nature of whose achievement is such, she believes, that Indians themselves have described the Boston icon as a "kindred spirit [as] a voluminous literature attests." Emerson's was truly an achievement of global dimensions that fulfilled the highest ambitions of Harvard's founders. 7. One very alert scholar, T. K. Wayne, in her Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, has suggested that "referring to himself as the Brahmin's hymn might be seen as a play on words, since the term 'Brahmin' was just coming into use in New England in the 1860s, to refer to Boston's cultural elite." Holmes' biographer Peter Gibran, moreover, cites "a long March 1856 letter from Emerson to Holmes suggest that Holmes and Emerson had been conducting an ongoing discussion, that Emerson's notions about 'The American Scholar' and about the scholars' necessary disengagement from irrational mass movements, may have had a significant impact on Holmes' later published description of the Boston 'Brahmin'." Gibran is on to something when he resolves one issue here, suggesting suggesting Holmes' definition of the Brahmin caste was a reflection of 'a major nineteenth-century transformation in the role of the 'Boston Brahmin' in American life. He writes: "If, in the past, New England's secular priesthood had combined intellectual, political and social leadership, by the time Holmes names the caste. it is purely an 'academic class', a community of scholars' defined by intellect alone Holmes' 'Brahmin' is clearly disengaged from operations of power, and more literally engaged in education." Alas, Gibran seems not entirely to understand the transformation in the post Civil War era when three of the four 20th century national capitals - New York, Washington, Boston - would emerge as dominant in national life. Boston, though it has come to be an economic superpower today, was not then anymore than it is now, the economic capital. That is New York. Nor is it the political capital any more than it would become the entertainment capital. Boston is the intellectual (which would mean more and more the academic) capital and for that capital its leaders are intellectuals and academics, and that is where power chiefly resides. However, Gibran is much closer to the mark when he goes on to say - of a period (though he does not himself allude to it) when Boston gained five new universities - the new Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Boston College and Tufts - that the "claims that Holmes does make for this new sort of 'Brahmin' seem to be based on a an important distinction between the new role of the intellectual and the traditional one of the 'clerisy' Holmes' writings can be seen as primary signs of a shift in the ideal of a 'life of the mind" from a model of end-oriented intellect in the service of power to disinterested intelligence with a goal of free speculation and criticism; from living off ideas to living for them." http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 11/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge Massachusetts B-15 In this connection, historian Morton Keller's "The Personality of Cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia" is worth reading. He is most pointed in his analysis of the three cities' distinctive cultural characteristics and how "they preserved these characteristics through three centuries of profound cultural and economic change," and in Boston's case a dramatic early 20th century decline. Writes Keller: "As the 20th century wore on, the Puritan city upon a hill once again became a force to be reckoned with in American life traditional Boston personality reasserted itself It did so by drawing upon - and ultimately bending to its tradition - the vitality of the [immigrant] newcomers The[ir] long struggle produced the Kennedy's, the leading modern American political family [while] Boston as a seat of learning entered into yet another flowering of Education, scholarship, scientific research, and high technology, making what Keller calls "the largest college town in the history of the world." How and why and who accomplished this? Listen to Notre Dame historian James Turner, whose analysis deserves as close attention as Gibran's. Of even the revolutionary privateers, the parvenu's of the "Salem junta," drawn to Boston as the Tory Loyalists departed in the 1770s and '80s, Turner writes that these nouveau-riches bequeathed to their Brahmin children a "shared ethic still recognizably Puritan in one respect: trade was honorable; ceaseless pursuit of wealth was not. Ancestral convictions imposed restraint. Piety, virtue, intellect outweighed profit, or were supposed to. Surprisingly, often, they did. Along with moral and religious precepts went a high and hereditary regard for the clergy. As religion shaded gently into learning the distinguishing characteristic of Boston's elite was the melding, achieved to perhaps a unique degree in American history, of the lives of the mind and the counting house." He sees this trajectory persisting, moreover, as I do, throughout the 19th century business crescendo. "Manufacturing in New England, then the railroads that opened the West, provided a stable investment As a result, children could eschew the temptations of avarice without risking the comforts of gentility. Avocation became vocation Barely had the mercantile elite consolidated itself when it began to evolve into something more varied. " Which was? "An aristocracy not of money," pronounces Turner, "but of mind bred from the crossing of the Unitarian clergy with the merchant princes in its heyday from 1840 to 1890." That's what Oliver Wendel Holmes seems to have foreseen, able to do SO with a clear eye perhaps because Holmes did indeed believe in democracy. The Boston elite's untroubled assumption of its duty to lead was not at all incompatible with democracy. Turner wrote: "A belief in hierarchy implied neither contempt for American republicanism nor enthusiasm for European aristocracy; quite the reverse America escaped [the evils of the European system] because of 'our political and civic institutions,' including most notably general access to education, the staircase by which any citizen might rise." 8. Emerson, the thinker - the individual apotheosis of the Brahmin ideal - is often faulted for not having been more of an activist, and it must be said - Louis Menand being right that what Holmes Sr meant by "scholar" we would call an "intellectual" - that intellectuals-as-activists played a very strong Brahmin hand, arguably the strongest, something one can see most clearly perhaps in the way that American conservatives today are apt to identify with yesterdays Boston Brahmins. Historically, however, conservatives have more often despised Brahmins; and because enemies, more than friends, can usually be depended upon to tell the truth, one of these critics must be called as a witness here. Indeed, in http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 12/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review many ways the best evidence of the nature and thrust of Boston Brahmin leadership - there are always, as Digby Baltzell remarks, more George Apley's than John Adams's - is that the Brahmins' most implacable enemies, historically, continue to be extremist American conservatives. Accordingly, while I discourage students from reading resentful anti-Brahmin authors (George Santayana: The Last Puritan; John P. Marquand: The Late George Apley), or their cousins the entertainers (Cleveland Amory: The Proper Bostonians), and insist immigrant-oriented anti-Brahmin rants (James Michael Curley's speeches about "Back Bay Bourbons") be balanced by pro-Brahmin hymns of praise by other immigrants (Mary Antin: The Promised Land), I absolutely require students read, first: the great Boston novels (Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Henry James's The Bostonians, Howells' Silas Lapham, O'Connor's The Last Hurrah, May Sarton's Faithful are the Wounds, and West's The Living is Easy) and, second: conservative critiques like that of editor-author Samuel L. Blumenfield. An ardent enough conservative to have written regularly for the John Birch Society, Blumenfield's chief cause is disclosed by the title of his best known book, Is Public Education Really Necessary? (1981) in which he asserts that "socialists who were very active in the public school movement began operating in secret cells in America as early as in 1829." He is talking about Boston Brahmins, misled in his view by the British social reformer Robert Owen, whose ideas "reached the Boston Unitarians soon after their publication in 1813, disseminated in America by John Quincy Adams," then US minister to Britain. Blumenfield disparages, above all, Horace Mann, the Father of American Public education, whose statue now stands in front of the Massachusetts State House. Mann's educational model, influenced by the Prussian system, was adopted by nearly every state in the Union, and nothing discloses better the way the Puritan passion for education waxed rather than waned in Brahmin Boston. Blumenfield's response? Only in Boston did the public schools receive unflagging public support mainly because of the Unitarian movement, which strongly favored public education The takeover of Harvard in 1805 by the Unitarians is probably the most important intellectual event in American history It became the Unitarian Vatican, SO to speak, dispensing a religious and secular liberalism that was to have profound and enduring effects on the evolution of American cultural, moral and social values. It was, in effect, the beginning of the long journey to the secular humanist world view that now dominates American culture." That one paragraph is perhaps the most telling its author ever wrote. And having reached back to condemn Harvard, the venerable Puritan-inspired flagship of Boston Brahmin liberalism, Blumenfield wastes no time also condemning Harvard's modern sister, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1861 by William Barton Rogers. Noting that William's brother, Henry, had in 1832 written a series for the Free Enquirer, which Blumenfield explains was "the mouthpiece of the Socialist movement, advocating women's liberation, atheism and, above all, a national public school system," he continues, "out of these [articles] he and his brother William "later developed a plan for a poly- technical institute which would in 1861 be established as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology It is not without significance that America's leading scientific university should have been founded by a socialist working in concert with Harvard Unitarians." It hardly seems necessary for Blumenfield to add, but he does, of uber-Boston Brahmin James Savage, that "William Barton Rogers married the daughter of Savage, one of the leading Unitarian activists in the cause of public education." 9. Although Blumenfield considerably over-reaches with his polemic, the truth is that many Brahmins did admire Robert Owen, in whose circle it is a fact the word socialism first arose. Our old friend Francis Cabot Lowell, the Brahmin master spy of the English textile industry, may indeed have known Owen. Certainly Owen's name comes up more than once in Robert Daltell's Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates, where the author notes "an eerie amount of similarities between the communities of New Lanark (an Owenite settlement in Scotland) and the Waltham-Lowell mill towns. http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 13/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review All of which is very much to the point that it would be a mistake to lose track of those other Puritan themes we began with here. Autonomy continued to figure importantly. The choice by Francis Cabot Lowell of Waltham, and of his successors of the town they named Lowell after him, was not just about water power. As Mona Domish has documented in Invented Cities, Boston Brahmins showed clearly in the their decisive choice not to develop (as Middle Class Yankee Bostonian merchants wanted) the Back Bay as a dock area extending Boston Harbor, that they wanted "Cultural Boston" where they wanted it, just as surely as was the case with "Academic Boston," "Horticultural Boston," and "Industrial Boston." Similarly with philanthropy, about which there is more to say of the Brahmin chapter than has already been touched on here. Thus George W.Cooke in his Unitarianism in America quotes B. B. Frothingham to the point that The Town of Boston had a poorhouse and nothing more until the Unitarians initiated humane institutions for the helpless, the blind, the insane. The Massachusetts General Hospital (1811), he McLean Asylum for the Insane (1818), the Perkins School for the Blind (1832), the Female Orphan Asylum (1800) were of their devising The Unitarian conception of the relations of altruism and religion was pertinently stated by J. T. Kirkland, president of Harvard when he said that 'we have as much piety as charity, and no more. A more detached witness agreed. After his 1842 visit, Dickens wrote of these philanthropic efforts: "I sincerely believe that the public institutional charities of this capital of Massachusetts are as nearly perfect as the most considerable wisdom, benevolence, humanity can make them." It was not just the case that Lowell was determined in C. M. Rosenberg's words in his biography of the Brahmin entrepreneur to "prevent the squalor and social unrest he had observed in the British factory towns in any of his own factories in Boston," but the "quiet paternalistic capitalism that built the boarding houses, the company store and schools at Waltham," was just one example of his biographers claim that "Lowell [was] always eager to combine goodness with profit," as keen a philanthropist, interestingly, as his son John, founder of the Lowell Institute of which more in this series soon, was an educator. Other examples and on the part of all Lowells partners and the Boston Associates generally abound. According to University of Michigan sociologist Dorceta Taylor, "the Boston Associates gave generously to Harvard University and the Massachusetts General Hospital." On the other hand the magnificent Beacon Street palazzo overlooking Boston Common of Nathan Appleton, a leading Boston Associate, discloses how splendid was the state the Associates lived in, never mind providing quite the setting for the marriage of the daughter of the house to poet Henry Wadswoth Longfellow, wherein, by the way, it was she, not he, who was said to have risen in the world. Furthermore, Robert Dalzell's study argues that the idea "[the Boston Associates] primary goal [was] increasing the return on capital" is actually a case not proven. "The truth is, Dalzell writes, "that the facts do not fit this thesis," and he insists that although "in its day the Waltham-Lowell system represented the greatest single concentration of industrial resources in the US," in many important ways that concentration was "unique," and cannot be understood by analytical models that "rely on economic factors alone." It is a striking conclusion. And led to another. "The tradition of service in Boston has run especially deep," Dalzell noted, and "it was the Boston Associate who, more than any other single group of individuals, who created that system The world the Associates made is with us still." Perhaps just as we owe the beginnings of American philanthropy to the Puritans, we may also owe the overall principles of that philanthropy to the Brahmins. Yes or no, why is this possibility, one wonders, such a secret? For the same reason that as I observed here in "Brahmin Dreams" last time, the Lowell/Curley era in Boston attracts SO much more attention, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 14/20 3/21/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism I Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review historically, than the Eliot/Fitzgerald era. The fact that of the two Boston mayors, Curley was an entirely local figure, and Fitzgerald the founding father of the greatest American political dynasty of the 20th century, whose name John Fitzgerald Kennedy bore and whose legacy was discernible as well in the career of Edward Kennedy, seems hardly to matter. Similarly, the Harvard presidents as well as the Boston mayors. Lowell, influential in education, was nothing like Eliot, a figure of huge historical importance, whereas Eliot, the founder of modern Harvard and a founding professor of MIT - "America's headmaster" - is the archetypal Boston figure (the reformer) in the same way JP Morgan (the financier) is New York S, Theodore Roosevelt (the statesman) is Washington's, and Cecil B. DeMille (the movie mogul) is LA's. Yet Eliot was also the great liberal champion. He appointed the first observant Jew (Charles Gross) to a Harvard professorship, and as well the first practicing Irish Roman Catholic, Jeremiah D. Ford. He railed constantly, moreover, against the notoriously arch-bigoted Brahmin sponsored Immigrant Restriction League of which President Lowell was an officer. Why does every one of Lowell's persecutions - of Jews, blacks and homosexuals - become the subject of whole books, while Eliot is rather noticeably ignored? The question arises with special intensity because Eliot was also an important religious figure He was an ardent Unitarian who has been compared to Unitarian founder William Ellery Channing, the son of a father of whom Richard Norton Smith called in The Harvard Century a "high priest in the Unitarian Sanhedrin that dominated Boston." Only Jerome Karabel in The Chosen underscores fairly the conflict "within the Protestant elite between its progressive, inclusionary wing and its conservative, exclusionary wing," a conflict "embodied" - Karabel's word - "by the "two Boston Brahmins who were bitter personal and political enemies." Eliot, for instance, "struggle[ed] desperately" as president emeritus to block Lowell's efforts to restrict Jewish admissions to Harvard in the 1920s. Is all this explained by anti-Brahmin or perhaps, anti-Unitarian prejudice, and if so, cultivated by whom? Certainly - and Eliot, alas, was a leader in this too - Unitarian Brahmins were often hostile to Catholicism. (Italian unity and independence was a favorite cause, the enemy being the always detestable Pope; Irish unity and independence much less so, the enemy being good Queen Victoria!) But we too often confuse Yankees with Brahmins. As Oscar Handlin and Deborah Solomon and other scholars since have documented, for example, the bigoted mob that burned down the Catholic convent and school in Charlestown in an action cited repeatedly to illustrate the depth of ethnic and religious hostility in Boston in the mid 19th century was a working class Yankee mob, while most of the students enrolled at the convent school were the daughters of Boston Brahmin Unitarians. Brahmin bashing? Consider the title of a book on the subject, Brahmins and Bullyboys: G. Frank Radway's Boston Album (1973). Bad enough to characterize Irish Americans as bullyboys; equally ignorant to suggest that their antagonists were, not Yankees, but Brahmins. Worse was an article in Slate by Andy Bowers, "What's a Boston Brahmin?" which mindlessly announced that Brahmins were "well known for their hostility to the Irish and other immigrants." I say mindlessly because an hour with Oscar Handlin would have confirmed that Bowers, again, was confusing Brahmins with Yankees. Who A. D. Richmond was confusing with whom in his book of 2001, Unmasking the Boston Brahmin is a little more difficult to discern, but perhaps a somewhat unconscious part of the same Brahmin-bashing. Few would protest his thesis that that "the slow progress of racial integration into the social and academic life of a university that professed to have a liberal ideology that supported reform" justified entirely "[b]lack students and academics push[ing] through a reform agenda [in the] struggle to to reform Harvard and Radcliffe from 1945 to 1990." Much more problematic, however, is Richmond's contention that "the Boston Brahmin construct describes the white administrators who were in the position of power" and that "when the Brahmins expanded to include black and white administrators by the 1970s Harvard's institutional position changed slightly to accommodate the new affirmative action policy." As we will see in more detail in the last article in this series, from the perspective of nearly a century later, it was in 1927 that the final act of the Brahmin Ascendancy played out - President Lowell's presiding over the final negative response to the appeal of Sacco and Vanzetti - a very public surrender of the ground from which recovery was probably never possible and in the wake of which any claim of Brahmins to be still a speaking aristocracy to a listening democracy was utterly incredible. To call anyone a Boston Brahmin in the sense Richmond clearly means it in 1990 or even in 1970, even if one allows him a certain latitude in 1945, is problematic. We have already encountered here in Samuel Eliot Morison and John Brooks Wheelwright individuals who in the generation after the end of the Brahmin Ascendancy still felt the pull of the old values. Children of the last of the Boston Brahmin aristocracy whose mandate was widely accepted, these individuals - who included such figures as PBS god-father Ralph Lowell, Watergate hero Eliott Richardson and poet Robert Lowell - earned their place in the new ethnically diverse Boston ruling class of the post Brahmin Ascendancy entirely on their own, as individuals, no longer as members of a caste or aristocracy as Holmes defined it. To identify such men as Boston Brahmins, rather than as descendants of Boston Brahmins, is hopelessly misleading. http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalism/ 15/20 3/22/2016 On Boston Brahmin Liberalism I Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review In contrast to such present-day American confusions about the term Boston Brahmin, the Times of India in recent observations about the subject - by Chidanaand Rajahatta in an article of October 24, 2009 - is a model of clarity, as well as subtlety in venturing what may be Americans difficulty with the term today: Indians who study or teach at Harvard or MIT (both in Boston) are not areas often kidded about being Boston Brahmins. The expression was first used by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1860 [who] borrowed the idea of the pedagogic Brahmin from India, and saw them as a 'race of scholars', whose aptitude for learning was congenital and hereditary.' There was quite a bit of traffic in those days between Massachusetts and south and east India. However, the term has died a quiet death in the US. Perhaps it has something to do with political correctness. John Kerry was briefly described as a Boston Bramhin when he ran for president in 2004 but the moniker did not catch on. Given that neither learning nor philanthropy, but riches and ethnic bigotry and oppression, are the definition of Brahmin for most Americans, that was perhaps fortunate for Kerry. 10. Back in Harvard Yard, finally, none of the US presidents we opened with were or became Unitarians. Except, perhaps, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. What say? In his book, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, a most telling anecdote of Ted Sorenson, President Kennedy's influential speechwriter and a Unitarian, was the one in which Kennedy asked him once, jokingly, if anything of his Catholicism was rubbing off on Sorenson. "No" Sorenson replied, "but I think some of my Unitarianism is rubbing off on you." Admits Sorenson: "Many of the speeches I drafted reflect Unitarian principles." Each was arguing from his own background, of course. But Jane Greer once pronounced even Kennedy's inaugural address as pure Unitarianism. And the distinguished Roman Catholic journal Commonweal titled Robert Lander's review of Sorenson's book, "Unitarian Advice." Douglass Shand-Tucci is an historian of American art and architecture and Boston/New England studies. His most recent book is the second volume of his study of the architecture of Ralph Adams Cram (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2005) and he also teaches at the Boston Architectural College in the Masters degree program in Historic Preservation. He is the founder of the innovative new history site, Back Bay Historical | Boston CentricGlobal Studies, where his monthly longform blogs have become his principal publishing outlet. Related: American Aristocracy - Letter from Boston: Toward a American Aristocracy ====== Brahmin Dreams: In Search of http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/american-inheritance-harvard-pulpit-boston-brahmin-liberalisn 16/20